Survival Of The Fittest

[Evie McKown is done playing, so now she’s here.]

So that was weird.

Walking away down the cramped and foreboding tunnels, Evie couldn't help but look back from time to time, worrying that Connie might be following. That she'd turn around one of those times and suddenly see her with a comically oversized kitchen knife and a slasher smile, ready to finish what Alex had started. Her fears never realised, luckily. But the paranoia stuck with her. What the hell was up with that girl? Alex should could parse. He was a monster, sure, but his actions made sense: get his hands dirty early, get himself a fearsome reputation and get past the fear of having to hurt other people good and early. It was horrible, but it was logical. What did Connie stand to gain doing what she was doing? By all accounts it made no sense, and Evie wanted it to. She wanted a story, lore she could follow from beginning to end and make a coherent narrative of. Something someone could write up on a wiki and she could look over later and go oh, so that's why she was like that, Dark Souls style.

If only real life were so simple.

Anyway, in the end, the duo made their way to the Infirmary. A brief jaunt through the cold from the tunnel exit into the exterior door nearest to it, and they were back in the relative warmth afforded by shelter from the wind. A quick reconnoiter found the place to be apparently empty of other people, though there was evidence of their passage. Things had been moved, drawers and boxes had been searched. Didn't seem like much had been taken, besides anything remotely sharp, which didn't come as a surprise. Seemed like the kidnappers had decided the closest things to weapons the kids were allowed to scavenge were rocks and stout branches, everything else had to come direct from them. There were some other medical supplies, mostly medicines that looked to be long since expired, but at least a few items that could help replenish their first aid kits.

After her brief search, Evie found herself a bed to perch on, and lifted up her shirt to have a look at yesterday's handiwork. The bandage still looked clean on the outside, which was encouraging.

"Hey, uh, Claire? Would you mind getting another look at this? Won't find a better place to re-dress it, right?"

S091: CLAIRE HAIG — CONTINUED FROM "Playtime"

Every so often, as they walked, Claire had checked behind them.

Some would call it paranoia; she insisted on another word, "precaution." As this game had shown thus far, when your guard came down, prowling daggers raised in response. And Claire, for the record, had zero interest in being stabbed in the back and left for dead. So, she knew that Connie hadn't followed them—otherwise, Claire would've seen her.

As for why Connie had acted like that, it was hard for her to say. She was never all that great at reading people accurately; when she did, it tended to be colored by the lens of suspicion. One could only ask "why?" so many times until it became pointless. In the end, who could say? Perhaps even Connie lacked an answer to that question.

Eventually—though with no thanks to their reticent guide—they found their goal. The infirmary was sterile, as expected; the offices and operating tables were clean but barren. Bottles of pills, long since expired, filled the cabinets and lay strewn across tables and countertops. Everything from the ceilings to the tiled floors felt sinister.

Claire was under no illusions: though it was, by temperature alone, warmer than its surroundings, this was still a cold and lonely place.

Soon, they found the ward proper. There, in that room, were four beds, empty, more than enough for the two of them. Evie sat down on one and then spoke; her wound would need attention, which meant that Claire would need to step back into the role of a field medic in a warzone. She nodded her head. Someone had to do it, and there were worse jobs.

She didn't trust the wraps that were left. They were old and rotting, mummy's cloth, and she doubted they would still do their jobs. So, Claire opened her bag, dug around, and pulled more gauze from the first-aid kit. Then, she undressed the wound—caution and care were the words she went by as she went about the process.

She stripped away lengths of gauze, once white, now stained red and brown with old, dried blood. Then, she discarded it into a bin in the room. After that, she spied the wound and searched for signs that something might have been amiss. She saw nothing of the sort—normal-colored skin around the wound and fluid that was clear, not yellowed.

Far from the signs of infection that she had feared, Claire found only the markers that indicated the wound had begun to heal.

It was a relief. Claire sighed openly and then turned to Evie. "It looks good to me. Well, not good, but—well, you know what I mean. I don't see any signs of an infection or anything." She paused a moment, looked away, and then back at Evie. "We should probably clean it again, just in case, before we wrap it."

Encouraging, but not enough to assauge Evie's nerves as she lay back, resting on her elbows to allow all-angle access to her midriff. Sure, it looked like it was going to be fine, but how was she to know whether it'd be fine underneath or if Claire was about to uncover some gruesome Resident Evil-looking mess of infection? The girl bit her lip, and despite all the larger concerns in her mind, still found herself making an effort to suck in her gut before Claire could see.

Into the trash went the old bandages. Evie dared to look. The dull brown stains looked normal enough. She kept averting her eyes from what they'd been concealing.

She held her breath for what felt like aeons. A few seconds passed and Claire sighed audibly, and reassured Evie that there was nothing to worry about. Only then could she bring herself to look down and agree. Yeah. Gross, maybe, but by no means frightening. Were she back home she could just take it easy for a few days and let it heal, definitely worse than any injury she'd sustained before but nothing to worry terribly about.

Just a shame she was already starting to shiver in a frigid disused infirmary at an abandoned research station in the back of beyond then, really.

"Yeah, sounds ideal. Can't be going around with blood all on me, right?"

Evie forced a chuckle, trying not to let the motion disturb her wound too much. It still did. She winced as much with regret as actual pain.

"Thank God you're here, yeah?"

As far as Claire was concerned, God had little to do with it.

She wasn't one of the religious folk. Not an atheist, per se—she would describe herself as agnostic—but she had never found any convincing proof for the existence of a higher power. Faith was never on her mind. If God, or some other deity, was involved with this, it spoke magnitudes to such a being's character.

Still, she understood the use of phrases like 'thank God' and used them herself, even if she had no belief in one. And, truth be told, if anything was a test of faith, this island was it. Only divine intervention was likely to forestall their ends—that, or an amount of luck that, to her knowledge, would be uncharacteristic of this world.

"It's nothing. Just what a friend should do, right?" Her friends had always helped her deal with emotional pain; now, she was dealing with her friend's physical wounds. "Anyway, you know the drill—more water and saline. I don't think we need alcohol this time." She still remembered the screams.

Claire pulled the bag to her again and pawed around for a moment. Then, she found the bottle of water that was already open. The same one she had used last time. At the top, some of the water had frozen into slush. Sometimes, when she left a bottle of sparkling water in the back of the miniature fridge in her room, it did the same thing.

She unscrewed the cap and then shot a warning glance at Evie. It would be cold, but there didn't seem like any good way to heat it. The whole island was a frigid waste. Next, she held the bottle over the wound and tilted it slightly, which let the water inside trickle onto it. It washed down across the skin, some blood in tow.

To tell the truth, Evie’s regard for God - assuming she did actually believe in one and wasn’t just going along with what she’d been brought up with - was hardly great either. Too many things in her adolescence had given her cause to question a supposedly all-knowing, all-powerful, and most importantly all-benevolent intelligence’s decisions to make the world so needlessly harsh in such basic ways. Why’d she have to be afraid to tell people she liked girls? Why were all the cute animals ostensibly created specifically to suffer for human benefit? Not to mention, y’know, allowing the present atrocity to continue for eight iterations.

Not that any of that was on her mind at the moment. Thank God was just a figure of speech, from someone who’s rather waffle something meaningless than let silence reign. It was a deep-rooted need, not really anything she could rationalise outside of the simple urge to be likeable… whatever that was even worth, any more.

It was a worth having a friend at least. Evie and Claire hadn’t exactly been close before, maybe her pleasant nature was to thank for having her as an ally now? In any case, Evie took a firm grip of the sides of the bed and braced herself. The cold water burned, but not so badly as alcohol on an open wound. Her teeth dug into her bottom lip, she tensed and hissed, but that was the worst of it. Before long the wounded girl could unclench her jaw and speak again.

She looked up at Claire, vulnerable and grateful.

“Well, I mean, thank you you’re here. I’d be pretty fucked otherwise.”

"I think that's part of the point," Claire said. Then, she clarified: "I mean, to make us feel alone. They want everyone to be distrustful and suspicious because that means we break down faster." She paused a moment, a search for the right words to use. "They want us to feel hopeless and alone, to see shadows around each and every corner."

There was a grim look on her face. Claire had always found it difficult to see the bright side of situations—for her, shadows lurked everywhere. Monsters weren't real, not in any physical sense, but they existed as concepts and ideas. And, sometimes, she wondered, in her lowest moments: could she become one?

Claire thought a lot of things about herself. Most of them were negative. Words like "awful" and "hideous" defined her at the worst times—phrases like "I'll never" and "I should" set cruel rules for herself that she knew were impossible to follow. Often, she wondered how far she'd make it in life. The answer now was obvious: not very.

At the very least, here, at this moment, she was doing something that she felt was right. If she wasn't here, at this moment, to treat Evie's wounds, then who would? If she wasn't here, it was possible that Evie would have died already, skewered by Alex. That was good enough. So, for now, being alive was ideal. She had some amount of purpose, even in this Hell.

Claire cut some of the dressing—little snips with the scissors as if she had decided to crop the edges out of a picture. Then, she folded the separated piece into a little square, took out the saline, and poured it over the makeshift pad. Then, she dabbed it on and around the wound. It seemed thoroughly clean.

"Alright," she said. "All we need to do now is wrap everything, alright? Then, it'll be over." A half-smile, half-hearted. Then, Claire began the process. She wrapped the bandages around the wound—again and again, around and around, over and over—until it was tight, secure, and sealed away, safe and sound.

Then, as they wrapped it all up, Evie asked a question, a request, wanted to be left alone for a moment. It wasn't something Claire opposed—she spent most of her time alone anyway, so it was a return to normalcy. She could take some time to eat and get ready to sleep. Then, in the morning, they'd depart again.

Nobody would even remember that the two of them were here.

So, with another look, she smiled. A little wider. "Yeah, sure. Then, let's have something to eat and go to sleep." With that, she left the girl's side, and stood tall. She turned, took a step, then another, and strode out, the other side from where she had come. Footsteps lingered in the distance and then faded away again.

Soon, she'd return. But soon, they'd all be gone anyway.

S091: CLAIRE HAIG — CONTINUED IN "Here to Stay"

It had occurred to her that morning that Evie rarely used profanity. It was a conscious choice she made, despite often wanting to: Evie was usually pretty careful about what she said, how it made her look, how it might make her peers feel. Her choice of words just now hadn’t exactly been an intentional testing of the waters, indeed she’d surprised herself with how casually she’d dropped the F-bomb without thought. Was that part of “dying as herself”? Maybe it was.

Moreover, as far as testing proverbial waters went, it didn’t seem to have bothered Claire much either. So that was nice. One fewer worry for the time being. In the mean time, the other girl was expediting on how she figured their captors intended them to feel. How to make them all into Alexes. Thinking back to her immediate distrust of Connie, yeah, it made sense.

“Yeah, think you’re right there.”

It was during the process of washing and bandaging that Evie became pointedly aware of one of the AT’s cameras surveilling the room. Not a long process all told, but when her mind drifted to the topic of who might be watching, it started to feel like it was dragging on. She became anxious for it to be done with, so she could ask Claire for the favour that she found herself wanting.

But patiently she waited, arms getting slightly sore, thinking about what she would even say. Until it was done.

“Hey, um,”

Evie gingerly sat up, adjusted her clothes back into place. Inclined her head towards the camera by way of indication.

“Would you mind giving me a moment?”

Beat. In retrospect, the notion of privacy was a little laughable in context.

“Just me, my family, and whatever sick people are watching for fun?”

[Evie McKown monologues, and passes the time until she's gone.]

((continued from Playtime))

Right on cue, the door opened.

Connie stood framed in the infirmary's main entrance, letting in the cold and some weather to boot. Inside the building were Claire and Evie, her boon companions of recent times with whom she'd shared such great experiences as 'pretty sure I didn't point you in the right direction'. Nevertheless, there they were, here was she.

Okay, wait a second.

How'd this happen?

..mm no she must have got turned around and now she'd walked in on the same people again.

Huh. Unintentional.

dot dot dot.

Connie closed the door on them.

((connie continued in Fall out through the fallout))