No Prayer for the Dying

[Dr Adjective]

[Andrew Lapson ran to the hills.]

The circular nature of it all was not lost on Andrew.

Ever since he'd woken up five days prior, his life had been one long sequence of meeting people, having something go catastrophically wrong somehow, and then watching those people run off and leave him to the wilderness' tender mercy. All told, it was actually a little anti-climactic. Survival of the Fittest was not a subject that Andrew Lapson was well read on, it was rather a taboo in his household in fact, but he imagined that he knew about as much as any normal person did: it was like knowing about 9/11 or ISIS, sure, you didn't know the intimate details but everyone had a basic understanding of what they were. Only as it turned out, his understanding of SOTF as a handful of days of brutal violence out of which a single bloodsoaked survivor emerged was clearly not quite right. He'd spent the early days wary, on edge, steeling himself for fighting and gunfire to break out any moment... and as yet, the greatest foe he'd contended with was boredom, threatening to drive him out of his mind or into the grim embrace of the suicide pill his captors had kindly provided. There had been only a couple of flashpoints: that fake corpse on the first day, DeMarcus and his itchy trigger finger on the fourth, and that was sort of it. Truly it was the mind-numbing tedium of survival on a barren island with nobody to talk to that seemed to threaten him the most.

If only he'd known how dangerous boredom and an absent mind would be in advance.

Trudging through the featureless white plain with no particular direction besides "away from where the dangerous people are", Andrew was scarcely expecting the greatest danger to be from beneath. His eyes were on the horizon for the most part, occasionally moving to significant obstacles in case someone had the bright idea to lie in ambush in the middle of nowhere for a random passer-by. Hey. It could happen. Andrew was not intending to go out like an absolute chump, getting picked off by some maniac with a hiding place and a dream. It was ironic, perhaps, that the danger to his footing came not when he was striding awkwardly through built-up snowdrifts, but later, when he came upon a small copse of trees largely clear of snow, probably from a combination of human activity and the trees breaking up the flow of wind. Speaking of human activity, there even seemed to be evidence of a campsite here, a long-dead fire and one of those makeshift shelters you'd see Boy Scouts make when they went out into the woods, ferns and stuff laid over a skeleton of branches to keep at least some of the wind and rain off. Finding the desolate sight more than a little unnerving, Andrew elected to give it a wide berth.

And that was when the - in retrospect, slightly conspicuous - patchwork of twigs and fallen leaves beneath his left foot suddenly gave way.

An agonised howl tore through the barren stillness.

Andrew toppled forwards, pinwheeling for balance. His bag slid clear of his flailing arm, landing a couple of feet in front of him. His knee and ankle alike protested at the sudden change in momentum, his right leg swung awkwardly, trying at first to land him on his foot, eventually being forced to settle for taking a knee when the height difference threatened to force his hip or knee into an angle it certainly wasn't prepared for. But naturally, much worst of all was the sharpened wooden stake that had torn pierced straight through both boot and foot, aided by the not inconsiderable weight bearing down on it. Andrew couldn't look, wouldn't have even if it were possible to. But he knew anyway. He couldn't will the image of it out of his mind. Tears gathered in his eyes, and for almost a minute, he simply vocalised his pain until his throat was hoarse.

After a while though, it became time to address the situation. Nobody was coming to save him. Andrew had to do something himself. Wasn't this the sort of thing - not the exact sort, but the general idea - that he'd been making himself strong for, physically and mentally? To be able to look after himself if nobody else was willing or able? So. Taking stock. The agonising pain radiating from the centre of his foot had served to distract him from it at first, but he was also reasonably sure his ankle was badly twisted if not broken outright. He must not have lost much blood yet, as he was still thinking clearly, so that was a mild plus. If he could just free his foot, he could... he could...

He could what?

Andrew tried to gather himself up. If he was going to do anything at all, he'd need to assess the damage. Moving his left leg at all was agony, but at length he managed to lift his torso back up off the ground and shuffle his right leg back to the point he was able to look down into the spike pit. He was no first-aider, but he was reasonably sure he'd heard that it was unwise to remove a foreign object that had completely impaled part of the body. It made sense to him, while it's in there, it's preventing a huge open wound from bleeding everywhere. But that was with a view to getting the wound in front of an ER doctor who would know how to look after it.

But Andrew was, after all, on his own.

Nobody was coming to carefully remove the spike through his foot and bandage it up for him.

Nobody was coming to save him.

So he would have to do it himself. What other option did he have, slowly bleed to death in the snow, if he didn't freeze first? So he formulated a plan, the best one he could think up in the moment. He'd dig the spike out from underneath his foot, bring them both out of the hole together. Then he'd find something to bite down on, get the sterile pads ready in advance, and yank the fucker out. Allowing a couple of seconds to recover from that, he'd have plenty of time to then bandage up the open wound and move to safety. What he'd do from there, he didn't know. Maybe someone alive out there was still friendly, and knew enough first aid to do something better than he could. It was a long shot, but any odds were better than certain death, right?

And so Andrew crouched over the punji pit, and tried to dig in the frosted soil with his bare hands. No good. He considered his first aid kit, maybe something in there could do the job. Yeah, no. Tweezers and kid-safe scissors weren't going to do much more than his nails. Besides, he'd stupidly left his bag where it fell, a scant few feet away but an unbelievably difficult motion to reach it. So what did that leave? He could snap the end off the top of the thing and yank his foot off real quick? Would that work?

"Who in the fuck," he grumbled through gritted teeth, "thought this was a good idea somehow?"

Andrew glared around, looking for a camera set up to capture the moment. Eventually he spotted the telltale glint of light off a lens up in a tree.

"Listen," he yelled, anger and pain getting the better of good sense.

"Whoever the fuck did this, swear to God, they better get the blame, I want the non-maniacs out there to know they're dangerous, alright!? This is not Andrew Lapson fell down and hurt his leg and died, this is Andrew Lapson was fucking murdered by some Jigsaw-ass motherfucker! You hear me!?"

Spurred on by his display of defiance, Andrew gathered the neccessary adrenaline and set to his next attempt to free himself. The length of spike still protruding from his foot was awkwardly short to get two hands around, but with some effort he was able to find a firm enough grip. He pulled in opposing directions, as hard as he could. And all he succeeded at doing was amplifying the already overwhelming pain in his foot. A loud "FUCK!" erupted from his lungs, and he changed gears, lurching towards his fallen bag after all. By this point, the time and the continued disturbances from the wound had seen a fair amount of blood drained into the devious little trap pit, and Andrew's head was starting to feel a slight bit light.

"I... fucking hate..."

He didn't even know who he hated. The hypothetical people who weren't coming to save him? The asshole who'd set this trap only to not even have the courage to stick around and see what it had achieved? The psychopaths who'd put them all here in the first place? For fuck' sake, he'd tried his best this last near-week to be decent to the people he met, he'd even sort-of tried to be a hero when DeMarcus came waving his gun around, and this... this was his reward for all that? Maybe Andrew just hated life. That life let bad things happen to good people, throwing proverbial darts to strike innocent folk with tragedies they'd done nothing to earn. Why him? He bet that sly shit Shawn was still doing just fine, he probably still had a dad to hope to get back home to. Why him, why Andrew?

After some effort, scrabbling forwards on the cold earth, Andrew's fingers curled around a section of his daypack's strap. He pulled it in towards him. Maybe with the strap, he could wrap it around the spike and snap it that way, maybe he... maybe he could...

Had everything been spinning like this before?

Maybe he just had to... bite the proverbial bullet, pull himself free and face the pain.

At least the pain he was already experiencing had faded somewhat, it all felt that bit more faint, far away. Almost like it was happening to someone else.

Andrew rifled through the bag, pulling out the dented metal tin of first-aid supplies. Half the shit in there he didn't recognise, nor was he in any state to try to work it out. Some part of him seemed to think he needed disinfectant, medical alcohol or something? Alcohol... man, he really wanted a smoke right about now actually, though a drink would do.

Wait, why was there a single pill in the bottom of his bag? It hadn't been in the first-aid kit.

Oh yeah. That one.

He chose to ignore it. He was going to make it. For sure. He had the gauzy wrap stuff, he had the soft pads that it wrapped around, that'd do right? At least until he found someone to help. A vague notion of someone else from his time at the gym swam in his mind, an actual first-aider. He couldn't remember who he was, or was it she? Maybe one of those theys. He couldn't say, he'd never made much effort to know who was who. Maybe he'd get lucky and they'd fall into his lap anyway. Andrew planted his hands firmly on the ground beside the pit, steadied his good right leg, and bit down on the strap of his daypack.

Okay, here goes.

...

No, really this time.

...

Andrew took several short breaths, then finally willed himself to take one last, deep one. Gritted his teeth against the fabric. Yanked his left leg directly upwards as hard as he could. Another intense howl of pain filled the silence that had surrounded him since the last outburst. And yet his foot remained quite firmly stuck in place. He let the bag fall from his mouth. Regarded the gathered medical supplies strewn out before him. Looked down at the gruesome red mess at the end of his left leg. At some point, going over all his options, everything he'd tried, everything that had failed, he knew.

"I... did you... did you fucking hear me?"

He spoke to the camera again. His breath was coming short, his head was starting to spin. He knew.

"I want the fuck who did this, to get the fucking blame, okay!?"

Andrew's right leg gave way, and he fell forwards back into the frozen soil. God, he felt so drained. He could make it stop, the pain, he just had to reach down under him and get that fucking pill they'd given him. It wouldn't count, would it? Fuck it, he didn't have the mental capacity to think about it just then. Didn't really have the physical capacity to make the move anyway. But he could do it, he had to, nobody else would.

He could do it later, just needed a moment to rest.

Yeah, rest,

conserve some energy,

it was so

so fucking

cold

and his head was spinning like crazy.

rest would help

he needed his strength

nobody was coming to save him





Andrew Lapson's eyes fluttered closed, but sleep would not take him. Every part of him felt so comfortably numb, except the stabbing pain that refused to go away.

Well. There was still one thing that was in his power, that he needed nobody to come and do for him.

He blindly fumbled under his belly for the bag. For the pill.

He would do it on his own terms.

Fuck it. Nobody was coming to save him.

All it took was a laboured swallow, and soon Andrew’s consciousness left him.

The rest didn’t take long.

[Andrew Lapson, 2003-2021 †]