Survival Of The Fittest

Melanie Miles is an empty, shallow, and short life lived. She knew that now, when the words struggled to get through her collapsed lungs and her dry throat. Every single breath hurt, in some deep, indescribable way. Funny how she was so concerned about the girls a few minutes ago. For all her life, the natural world inspired adoration and fear from her. The sheer scale of it all. At that moment, she felt like nothing but a speck.

There was supposed to be more to her. There was supposed to be more from her. She was supposed to be bigger than this, on some metaphysical level. Her hands bigger, her reach wider, her grip stronger on the fabric of this little reality. She should’ve mattered.

“Godammit,” she said, at first. When the other girls left, she knew she would die here. Millie thought she made her peace with that, but somehow, that feeling of closure just wasn’t there. “Godammit, fuck!”

One hand, the one that’s not trapped, feebly pounded at the snow. The pain in her wounds was excruciating. She didn’t know it was possible to feel this.

There would be no ambulance, no doctors, no hospitals or aircraft to pick her up. Nothing could save her. She knew that, instantly. It struck her that it might take days for her to die, stuck here. Waiting for the cold to set in. If nobody takes her down, hypothermia would.

And as her own twilight set, over minutes, over what might’ve been hours, she just wished she had a hand to hold.

[Meena Kumar continued from Soul Gem]

Ren was hard to shake off. Hard, but not impossible. Meena only became convinced of that the moment she'd pulled it off. Now, she was down here.

The mountain had rumbled. Meena wasn't there in time to appreciate that, though. Now, she was here. And, she wasn't alone, and she wasn't talking about all the goat corpses, either.

She greeted her, cooly. As warm as the air. "Millie."

Meena liked to think she'd at least recognize all her classmates. Millie, she recognized for different reasons. It was always a surreal moment, finding the online presence of someone you knew in real life. In Millie's case though, well. She might have caught Meena staring oddly at her.

She stared now, not quite for different reasons, but additional ones. In a way, it was like looking into a funhouse mirror that told an alternate future.

It hurted to do anything, and even when doing nothing, the pain is still there. Throbbing and dull in some places, sharp and jagged the next, all screaming out to her, loud, loud, loud.

She snarled at Meena. Caught herself, and then stopped, but irritation still twisted her face. She didn't want to die unhappy, but she didn't want to die cruel. “You actually staying here?”

What a stupid question to ask. The bone of her leg jutted out unnaturally from the skin, next to pulvarized flesh. A carcass laid besides her, goat fur and gravel and tacky blood imprinting on to her arm.

Like it was some stuffed animal, maybe. Or a blanket.

“There’s- ow ow ow fuck. There’s- you shouldgetout.”

Before you’re like me, you know. A twitching pile of bone and flesh and misfiring neurons in a system. Before you’re immobile and pathetic and trapped. Like that.

Meena stared. Millie was like an animal caught in a trap but not finished off by it. If Meena was faster, she’d probably be stuck with her, close or far.

"Why?" she asked. "What'll happen?"

Sometimes back home she'd go back to Millie's Tumblr presence, scroll through it a bit. Schnadenfreude (or however you spell it) or indescribable hollowness like a black hole motivated her into staring into that abyss. It was funny, in a way Meena could have seen herself holding all the same beliefs if she just stayed in the right places at the right time. Sometimes she'd wonder what Millie would think if the roles were reversed. Maybe her ex was right - she was full of herself in that way, seeing herself in strangers and wondering what they saw in turn.

“Avalanche. Dumbass.”

She gestured towards herself. Towards the snow enveloping her. Snaring her. Her mind reached for something else to say, to fill up the space and make it less awkward.

“You want to die here, it’s your funeral, sweetie, but, uh, I dunno if it’s gonna be- augh, as comfortable as getting shot or stabbed or… whatever the hell’s gonna happen later y’know.”

Meena was one of those girls- well, ok, people that she didn’t really know anything about but was aware of in terms of existing-in-her-general-vicinity. There were papers traded and glances shared and waiting in line at the bathroom. You know how it is.

All these people you meet in your life that you don’t care about but know anyway. Was she the kind to listen to her? Was she the kind to put her out of her misery? If Millie was able to, she would've stood up, took a rock, and smashed the heads in of every goat around her that was just as hurt and twitching and dead as she was.

Meena wrinkled her nose. "Joy," she muttered.

Sweetie, bestie, the heart emoji. Things she associated with suicide dares and other nasty messages in her writing peers' inboxes. The zoomer bless your heart. Millie hadn't said anything so nasty to her - yet - but Meena could drive the sentiment into her mental image of her, like a stake into a poppet. She could imagine Millie as the person who sent one such message. She could convince herself she was probably right.

"I'm not going anywhere though." Not out of any kindness. Certainly not for the goats.

(Goat biryani was Meena's favourite. Maybe someone somewhere got assigned a crock pot as a weapon? Kitty or Robin got a heater, so. Lucky hypothetical jackass who had the means of delicious cooking that she'd never taste again. Now she was mad at someone who might not even exist.)

Meena used to be cutesy, end all her posts with a heart symbol, unironically. She stopped quickly. But mentally, she added that heart to the end of what she said, with the same vicious intent of sweetie. She kinda wanted to taste their own medicine. Make them taste their own medicine. After all, if someone said the world would be better without you the world would be better without them and that included Meena. That maybe (probably) included Millie.

“Alright, suit yourself.”

Millie turned her focus away from her and to the dying animal she laid on. There wasn’t that much more to say, but she wanted to drive it home just so Meena got the memo- “Don’t blame me when the terrorists put your corpse in the body bag in a few hours. If they could even find it, I mean."

Her blood spilled into the snow, blooming red inch by inch as the heat from her veins melted through, soaked in-between the gaps of the flakes, almost sizzling as warm hemoglobin kissed the sub-zero precipitation.

Millie was dying. She didn’t need to, but you needed excavators, human and machine, when an earthquake happened and people were stuck. Meena wasn't an excavator.

Meena's fist tightened around the handle(?) of the gun.

In some way, it felt like she spent a lot of her time watching people - well, not die. That would imply their situations were going somewhere. All of her frie- no, peers, they all had worse lives than her. Even Millie, probably. They were unable to leave their shitty homes. They were miles away and Meena didn't have a car. They lacked money and mental strength and so did Meena. They were buried under rubble. They needed therapists. Meena wasn't a therapist.

There was nothing Meena could do but rage (with them?) and think that maybe if they hurried up and died, she wouldn't be having this problem (at them). That was her reaction to most problems, in the privacy of mind - mean anonymous messages? Die. Venting too much? Die.

Millie, knowing who she was (kind of), bleeding out in the snow, as Meena only had her own two hands and a loaded gun?

Her words were a touch snappy. "We're all going to die anyway. What's it to you?"

What was wrong with her, anyway? She couldn't think of anything better to say. She never could.

“Sorry for caring about you, I guess.”

Somehow, she still had the spite to roll her eyes. “If you want to break your bones and then die slowly of the cold, be my fucking guest. Rot for all I care. I’m sorry that I, like,- ugh- wanted you to live a few more days or whatever.”

She didn’t think about how her friends- her maybe-girlfriend- would feel when her account went cold. She didn’t really think much about her mom, and who would take care of her. None of that mattered now, and maybe it never mattered.

Instead, she glared at Meena. She thought about her broken upon the ground. She thought about her blood melting the snow. She didn’t really like that thought.

"You-"

Meena's blood was on fire. How dare she say that? She knew that passive aggressive wording, that spiteful little barb you gave to someone who just wouldn’t listen, how much you care be damned. But Millie didn't fucking care! Look at her glaring!

Her words stopped and started and choked on themselves. Tears came to her eyes like they always did when she got angry. Just thinking about Millie made her angry - maybe Millie could relate to that. Maybe that's why she was so fucking on the wire all the time, because just the thought of something could upset her.

And she had an excuse for why she was that way, probably. Everyone who'd ever hurt Meena, indirectly or directly, did. They had a reason for their anger, their cynicism, their depression, some horrific tragedy or unreasonable burden. And what did Meena have? Chemicals in her brain not working right by some fluke of nature? Even in a setting where those forces allegedly bore down on them all equally...

Millie was stuck under rocks and yet she was too close. The gun in her hands shook.

...was that it? Just nature?

She pointed it right at Millie, as if that would chase her off.

Looking down the barrel of the gun, Millie thought that she was looking at everything at once. It was a little hard to describe. She didn’t care for it all that much.

There has to be more than this, in these scant few seconds before life and death. She always prided herself on being a realist, but it was still hard to come to terms with it. Like, it just wasn’t comprehensible.

Life can’t just be made up of what makes hearts beat and clocks tick. Humanity can’t just be defined by physiological markers and a chain and DNA. Her life can’t be just chemical signals and ATP. It’s not like religion or anything, no, nothing like that- because she never really believed, she just hoped. She loved life, as much as she hated to say it, and with every breath she became more and more aware of how fast people are strangling this biome, and it made her so angry that people thought it was something they could just throw away.

A lot of things make her angry these days, but nothing did it like the thought of death did. And that anger overrode the fear with fury.

She snorted at the bullet in the chamber. What else could she have done?

Meena, just like herself, was a weak, insecure teen who thought that lashing out gave her a sense of power. It feels good, doesn't it? To have someone below you? To hurt? To shout at? To ruin?

"Do you even know you're-" Lucky. From Meena's perspective, Millie was so lucky. Everyone knew she was kind of a bitch and she was about to die and- the excuse. What it was didn't matter, she knew it existed. Meena's words and thoughts devolved into growling, until something emerged. "Everyone knew to stay the fuck away! And I'm- you're not and I'm- FUCK!"

Meena was angry at all the things Millie put out on the internet that sounded a little too much like the feelings she left in the drafts. She was angry at every word out of Millie's mouth that sounded like something she'd articulate in the safe coldness of a text box, but never with her overly soft tongue. She was angry at anger itself, and the feedback cascaded into half-formed, half-conscious shouting.

"Who hurt- you fucking- you care? You care do you?! Why are- why are ANY of us still- fucking- ARGH."

If the safety was off, what happened next might have been ruled manslaughter, a weakness to a rage of the flesh. The possibility was unacceptable. The rage hit the breaking point but instead of spilling, it crystallized. Meena's hands stopped shaking for just a moment.

She laughed at Meena’s anger. She really couldn’t help it. She liked being cruel, sometimes, and she liked hurting other people and she sometimes liked getting hurt, thought she deserved it, but not enough to rival what she dishes out. She liked yelling at people and she liked throwing things around. She liked seeing people who wronged her miserable. She liked telling people online to kill themselves when she got mad. She reveled in it, sometimes. It hurt once the shame set in, but before that, anything was on the table.

It was funny. She was the one dying in the snowbank, and somehow Meena was the one unraveling even more than her.

Something about the fact that there was such an odd juxtaposition?

What would Meena gain from shooting her? A dying girl with barely anything on her, really, what good would it do to her to pull the trigger? Just… painting herself as a murderer, really, some rash stupid decision that would mark her and bloody her hands forever. Something that Millie could do, almost had done, days ago when she threw ceramic and plastic down over the window with an intent to scare that transformed into malice.

So she didn’t even try to move away. Maybe it was because she didn’t believe Meena was capable of it. Maybe it was because she no longer gave a shit. Maybe some obscure part of her still believed in goodness and rationality, even staring down a bullet.

“Of course I fucking cared, you-”

The feelings were hard to articulate. The cruelty was hard to maximize. The fury was hard to draw out.

“Stupid cunt I didn’t want you to die, who did you think-”

She undid the safety. She fired. Now it was premeditated.

She really did. She really did care. But Meena wouldn’t listen and she wouldn’t get out and now she’s dooming them both because Millie didn’t even have the chance to talk, and because Meena was a paranoid bitch.

The metal went through her face and jaw, boring through bone and skin.

Her brain was untouched. Her heart still beats in her body. Her lungs still took in the frigid air.

She exhaled, and the blood bubbled. And then she inhaled, and it was stuck to the roof of her mouth, going down her throat, stinking and fresh and dyeing the ground even more.

She looked at Meena. Really looked at her. And flapped the hunk of flesh and viscera partly hanging off, but not really, yet, little bits of teeth spilling out onto the snow. Tried to say something, but couldn’t use the right combination of muscles and nerve signals to spew out the vitriolic filth that she always used.