Survival Of The Fittest

One goth plus Greg still sat at a table inside La Gelateria. It was still late in the evening. The winter sun was still down. Streetlights outside still illuminated sheets of white clumps floating down from above like pieces of cotton. There was still a weather warning in place courtesy of the NWS's office over in Norton. Tomorrow morning was still gonna be snowplow weather. Greg was staring out the front window awkwardly. Heidi was slumped over with her arms crossed, looking slightly depressed and disinterested.

"HEEEEEAAAY, we drift in and out
HEEEEEAAAY, sing into my mouth
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view
I'm just an animal looking for a home and
Share the same space for a minute or two
And you love me 'til my heart stops
Love me 'til I'm dead
Eyes that light up, eyes see through you
Cover up your blank spots, hit me on the head
I go HEEEEEEEEeEEeEEEEeEEe
I go HEEEEEEEEeEEeEEEEeEEe
I go HEEEEEEEEeEEeEEEEeEEe," Wesley Schultz finished singing over the store's sound system.

There was silence.

Greg scratched the back of his head.

Heidi sighed something under her breath and then looked up at Greg. Her eyes stared through him.

"I was going to ask you if you thought it was actually supposed to be a happy song, but the real lyrics are different, so," she shrugged and then sighed again, "whatever."

"Uhh, ahahaha?" Greg said.

Heidi grabbed her phone, tapped in the passcode, and opened up Safari. Silently, she typed in a search query and then opened up the first result. She scrolled down for a few seconds.

"What have the artists said about this song?" She recited from the screen, her voice slightly stilted. "“That's a love song made up almost completely of non sequiturs, phrases that may have a strong emotional resonance but don’t have any narrative qualities. It's a real honest kind of love song. I don't think I've ever done a real love song before. Mine always had a sort of reservation, or a twist. I tried to write one that wasn't corny, that didn't sound stupid or lame the way many do. I think I succeeded; I was pretty happy with that.”"

She was silent for a few seconds.

"So, do you think it's actually a happy song?" She said.

Greg sat quietly for a few seconds. He... wasn't sure if he understood the question? He was slightly uncomfortable.

"Yyyyes?" Greg said, taking a wild shot at what he was supposed to say.

"Are you sure?"

He shrugged.

Heidi nodded in acknowledgement of his answer, and then shook her head slightly.

"Mmm. I don't think it is." She said. "I think... it's... as a song, it's about making you think you're listening to a love song. But it isn't actually a song about anything. It's someone who... fundamentally experiences life differently than the people who write love songs, trying to write a song that convinces you that what you're listening to is a love song. The guy who wrote it, he's au-"

She cut off her own sentence. Her jaw winched itself closed for a few moments, and her lips briefly pursed tightly and then twisted and curled to the side before returning to normal.

"- Never mind. You won't - just, never mind. But it's just -- it's one of the loneliest songs I think I can think of."

---

((Greg Craig continued from Greg and Jacob Are Too Sad To Go To White Castle))

One guy plus Greg were in the living room of an abandoned house. Greg was sitting in an old, decrepit, and ratty brown armchair. He was looking up at the other guy, who had just walked into the room. Greg did not know the guy's name. Greg's pack, with his gun in it, was leaning against the back of the chair. Jacob was presently not in the room.

"Uh," Greg started.

Salem, are you still awake?

((Salem Fox continued from Fever of Stingrays))

Salem blinked owlishly at the guy in the chair once, twice. He raised his free hand, adjusting his grip on the rifle with the other, and opened and closed his fingers a couple times in an approximation of a wave.

"How do you do, fellow human?" He croaked. He cleared his throat and coughed a little. "Eugh. Sorry. Need some water."

Right right right right, okay. Bring out the turntable, it's time for another record scratch, how-did-we-get-here moment. Physically, that's easy to answer. Salem didn't get a lot of rest, but he was up bright and early again, trudging his way back across the island in search of new shelter.

The walls were really starting to close in now, drawing everyone closer. Giving it some thought, Salem had figured that the last stretch of the game, since they were apparently in the latter half now, would end up with everyone restricted to one of the clusters of buildings eventually. The issue was figuring out which one. If he ping-ponged between the town and research station enough, it seemed like there was at least a 50/50 chance of getting it right or at least being on the road and only having to backtrack if he got it wrong, rather than having to make some kind of run for it when the Danger Zones went into effect.

So that took care of how his body got from point A to point B. The rest of him was another matter, and the body itself wasn't doing so hot. The lack of sleep was probably to blame, but the cold was really starting to weigh on him now. The constant exertion and the bumps and bruises and stab wounds he'd picked up along the way were piling up. Salem's head hurt, and his throat felt scratchy even with water. Wouldn't it be a hell of a thing if he made it this far just to catch a cold and then pneumonia?

So anyway, tl;dr, he just wasn't really feeling it this morning. The announcement kept playing over in his head, only the words jumbled into themselves and twisted around, muddying his memory of them already. He'd heard Julia's name twice and was one-third of the way sure that he'd hallucinated it.

Also, who the fuck was this guy?

"The door was open. You mind if I...?" Salem gestured to the second ratty armchair in the room, watching the guy's reaction. No immediate hostility or even real wariness, which was surprising if this was one of his classmates and maybe less so if he was in fact hallucinating and not exaggerating how bad his mental state was for bantz and internet relatability points. Salem rarely found himself coming up blank when identifying one of his classmates, at least by general vibe if he didn't care to learn their names. He was the fun facts guy, the shoulder to cry on, the designated driver; his classmates' little dramas had passed through his hands daily.

This guy, though, he wasn't ringing any bells. The steeples and towers of Salem's skills of peer-recognition remained silent. Not even a comical cricket chirp.

"Sorry," he said again, just as a way to fill the silence rather than because he was really sorry for anything. "This was just the first house I tried, and I didn't have a great night, so." He trailed off again.

"I think I'm on the verge of starting a trend, though," he said kind of abruptly. "I think the dark circles and swagless vibe are really gonna go places with the rest of the class. I recommend getting three hours of sleep and then going for a hike through the snow, if you wanna get in on the ground floor of that kind of thing."

Greg's eyes silently flicked to the rifle held at the other boy's side. It was... pretty evident that this guy had survived at least something, considering how beat up he looked. And that had the potential to mean a lot of things, and not all of those were great for Greg and Jacob.

So, Greg found himself in a bit of a pickle here.

He considered his options real quick.

If the guy didn't have bad intentions, and if Greg assumed bad faith and made the guy leave and walk back out into a blizzard, that would be messed up. If the guy did have bad intentions, and if Greg did the same thing, the guy wasn't gonna listen. He'd probably just shoot Greg. So... that was a whole half of Greg's mental flowchart of possibilities gone.

If he called out for Jacob, that was going to escalate whatever this situation was. And that would be bad no matter what, because there was already a gun passively involved.

He couldn't give the boy some bottled water, because that was going to look indistinguishable from him going for a weapon in his bag. He couldn't offer the guy the opportunity to grab himself some bottled water from the bag, because he wasn't sure if he could trust this guy not to just shoot him with the gun that was also in the bag.

And so on.

So... really, his only option right now was to play along, at least until he knew who this guy was and whether he was a threat. He was making jokes, which meant he was... maybe trying to defuse the tension? And he hadn't tried to kill Greg on sight, so... if Greg just kept up what he was already doing, presumably that wouldn't change.

So... yeah.

Greg breathed in quietly and scratched the back of his head.

"Uh, ahaha, uh, yeah, go ahead. I guess we've got room for one more." He said, making eye contact with the boy and nodding somewhat casually.

He reached his right hand out from his seated position, offering a handshake.

"I'm Greg."

Right, okay. So what was the play here? Salem might have been scraping the bottom of the barrel by day three, but he still wasn't about to lower himself to "hi Greg, I'm Dad" type bits.

He still shook the offered hand of course and gave it a firm squeeze and shake. A professional kind of handshake, though he was prepared to go full limp wrist if Greg here tried any of that asserting-dominance-through-crushing-your-hand stuff. He'd done it before and would do it again. (Probably, maybe, assuming he had any kind of future where shaking hands was a regular thing. He hadn't had it on his bingo card for today, admittedly.)

Anyway, Greg had a solid hand, if not handshake, so that nixed the hallucination theory that Salem had been semi-idly entertaining. That of course left the far stranger conclusion, which was that in his four years at John Endecott Memorial Academy, Salem hadn't committed every single face and name for his hundred-something strong senior class to perfect memory. Shocking and appalling, really. He could already feel his Instagram mutuals jumping ship in the face of such a gaffe; honestly, even if Salem did somehow end up the last man standing, it was going to take at least a few months for his social media stats to recover, which might as well be eternity in social media time.

"Hi, Greg," he said, smiling in a way that he could feel showed a bit too much tooth. Hard to correct that on the fly, so they were just going to have to improvise or lean into it. "I'm..."

Oh, he had a good one.

"Joaquin," Salem said. "You know, like Phoenix. I'm da fucking Joker, baby." He laughed a little at himself and released Greg's hand to flop down in the chair opposite him, figuring that was enough invitation.

"So what's up with you, Greg, living in this society and all?" He asked, adjusting to tuck his legs up underneath himself and rest his bag and the rifle against the side of the chair within easy reach. He hadn't considered lying about his name for more than a few seconds before because he'd figured the jig would be up within about that long. Honestly, he was just kind of curious as to how long he could keep the bit going here.

Two goths plus Greg sat at a table inside La Gelateria. They were currently engaged in a fairly heated discussion.

"Maybe I just don't like movies that are basically just "Boohoo waaah, I'm a white guy with my head stuck up my own ass and I got included in a cringe comp on Youtube and so now I'm going to shoot up my school," revenge fantasies," Sadie said.

"I mean, you're conflating "protagonist" and "hero". When it's trying to make a point, it's about the systemic issues at play, not about the Joker." Heidi said.

"It's literally fucking called The Joker." Sadie shot back from across the table.

"It's -" Heidi started before being cut off by Sadie.

"You see your honor, because society hurt my feelings, it's not my fault I shot Robert De Niro -" Sadie said before being cut off by Heidi.

"- don't interrupt me, that's not what I meant -" Heidi said before being cut off again.

"- well maybe don't say you sympathize with a spree-killer -" Sadie said before being cut off again.

"- I literally didn't fucking say that, I think the Joker's a fucking asshole. I'm saying that -"

Greg sank down in his chair somewhat, staring downwards at the table. He'd barely touched his gelato since the argument had started. He hated moments like these.

---

Greg reciprocated Joaquin's relatively unremarkable handshake and watched as the boy plopped down in the chair across from him. The name didn't ring any bells from the announcements, so... that was a few points in Joaquin's favor. Unless he was lying. But Greg had no way to be sure either way, so... he was gonna choose to assume good faith on this one.

"Ahahaha, well, you can certainly say I've been trying to," he said in response to Joaquin's 'living in a society' joke.

He nodded his head idly.

"But, uh, yeah, no, we've just been..."

Trying to pass the time until the inevitable.

"... hanging out. We were at the research base for a bit, but uh, we realized there was some, uh, smoke that could give us away. So we skedaddled. Managed to get here before the weather got too bad."

He scratched the back of his head, and then sank backwards into the chair. His upper body's movements were stiffened by the layers of the many windbreakers he was still wearing even though today's weather didn't seem... as cold as the last few days, at least to him.

"What about you? You're looking a bit rough around the edges, I mean, in addition to the fashion trend."

((Jacob Winters continued from Jacob & Greg Go To White Castle))

The sound of footsteps could be heard through the ceiling above the pair, trudging for the stairs near the front entrance. Soon they started heading down, revealing the figure they belonged to.

"Hey, be real careful if you go upstairs, Greg," Jacob said as he descended, eyes on the stairs more than the living room. "I felt like I was gonna fall right through the floor the whole time I was..."

He raised his head, discovering a new arrival had come in his absence. One who'd made enough of a name for himself, before they all got taken, that Jacob couldn't help but recognize him. One that had made enough of a name for himself after they'd been taken that the sight of him made his heart jump into his throat.

"... up there," he finished, voice suddenly strained.

"Smoke, huh? You been setting fires?" Salem raised his eyebrows a bit. He didn't remember seeing or smelling any smoke while he was at the research station, but that didn't mean there hadn't been any. Those buildings didn't seem like they'd burn, but maybe what was inside them would.

"Last couple days have been rough," he said in answer to Greg's question, throwing in a half-shrug to downplay the roughness a bit. "Didn't get a lot of sleep. Hard to get comfortable, you know?" He was about as close to comfortable as he could be right now, curled up in the creaky armchair. He really did want some water, but Greg still seemed jumpy, and Salem wasn't about to get himself shot in a "no officer, this really definitely isn't a weapon I'm reaching for" kind of situation.

He glanced up at the ceiling when footsteps sounded above them and then began to descend the stairs. For all his jumpiness, Greg didn't seem startled or bothered by those, so Salem had to assume that he was the only new addition here, between that and Greg's use of "we". Context clues, baybee. One element of the airhead presentation was that it made people less careful of what they said around him.

When Jacob arrived, Salem gave him a thin smile. This wasn't an unknown; they'd crossed paths before, if not significantly. He could tell just from the way Jacob looked at him now that he knew the score inside and out.

It was a little bit of a shame, actually. He really didn't want to get up out of this chair.

"S'goin' on, man?" He asked. He kept his hands visible on his lap, despite the urge to inch for the rifle.

Jacob nudged his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. A futile effort to hide the edge of fear and alarm in his eyes.

"... when'd you get here, Salem?"

"Just a minute ago." Salem sank back into the armchair with a sigh, letting the smile drop from his face.

"...You guys are really all the same, huh. Somebody just has to come along and ruin the ride." His fingers scrunched into the fabric of his skirt a bit. He was looking at Jacob, but keeping tabs on Greg out of the corner of his eye.

"I don't want trouble, okay?" He knew trouble would still come to him. Trouble was a friend; an annoying one, one that wouldn't stop blowing up his phone every time he tried to veer away, but still a friend. Maybe the only friend he had left, or the only one he'd ever had.

Man, sometimes Salem really regretted missing out on the MySpace era. That would have made a great profile quote.

"- I mean, we were on the highway, going like... 60 miles per hour during rush hour. And the car behind us was, like, this sports car. And I guess it just sort of... it lost control or something and rode up onto this hill going along the road. Like, I dunno, I didn't see what happened, really. I was on Twitter in the backseat. My dad was driving, and he said something like, "that guy's crashing," and I looked up like, "What?", and he was like, "behind us,". And I turned around, and I saw this car just kind of... I saw it swerving up the hill, and then it flipped sideways. And then I Iooked away, and I didn't see what happened after that. And a few seconds later, my dad says, like, "that guy just died," and I'm like, "... huh, I guess so," and then my dad's like, "if we were closer to him when he crashed, we could have died too," and I was like, "... huh, I guess so," and then we didn't talk at all the rest of the car ride home. I don't know. It's kind of, like... I guess, you don't really notice it when things happen to you in real life. Like, you don't really process "Oh, that person's dying a horrific, violent death, and I almost did too. This is where we are now. This is what just happened, like, you know, this is the situation now," until it's all already gone. The world just sort of happens around you. It's just kind of like, "Oh, okay," and then you shrug." Heidi said.

"What kind of sports car?" Sadie asked.

---

...

Oh.

Greg felt the hair on the back of his neck prick up. His eyes darted between Jacob, Salem, and Salem's rifle. He wasn't sure if his own bag, with his gun in it, was visible to Jacob or not.

His mind shot back to Kiera's corpse, slumped over in a chair, still bleeding.

He took a slow, shaky breath in, and then sat up straight with both his feet planted against the ground.

"Hey, hey, that's alright, we don't - we don't want any trouble either." He said slowly, raising both his hands in front of his chest. "I don't think any of us have to die here today, right? We can figure this out."

Jacob nodded his head, almost a little too quickly, too desperately. His hand remained in a wicked deathgrip on the railing of the stairs. Salem being here was the worst fucking possible news, and he'd do everything he could to stop himself and Greg from ending up on the next set of announcements.

"Yeah, like... whatever happened out there doesn't mean anything here, man. Long as your chill."

Salem blinked slowly at the two of them, maybe more man-eating tiger than house cat. He understood, in that moment, the meaning of saying that you could smell someone's fear. He felt like he could, even with the maybe-cold coming up on him. He wanted to taste it too.

"Cool," he said, that razor-thin smile slicing across his face again. "I'm gonna get some water, then. You know, as long as it's chill." He shifted in the chair to lean over the arm and unzip his bag, but he was still watching Jacob and Greg through his bangs as they fell over his face.

Obviously they were lying. Saying anything that they could because they felt like they needed to appease him. Salem had them in the palm of his hand, and like a kid deliberately stepping on bugs out on the sidewalk, he couldn't help wanting to crush them in his fist. What else was there to do, at this point?

"You like movies, Jacob? That's what we were talking about." He grabbed the emptiest water bottle he had in his bag and sat back up, unscrewing the cap and draining it in a few gulps. "Joker was fine. Kind of heavy-handed, you know, but I thought it was an interesting take. He's not actually like, my favorite Batman villain. I liked Two-Face more."

The water helped some, and Salem coughed a little to clear his throat as he replaced the cap on the bottle. "So, I don't have any change on me, but... you guys ever played spin the bottle?"

With the question posed, Salem held the empty bottle out and tossed it onto the floor in front of him with a flick of his wrist. Three pairs of eyes fixed on it as it spun underneath Salem's outstretched palm, like he was puppeteering it from above. None of them were focused on where his other hand was going next.

One goth plus Greg sat alone at a table inside La Gelateria. It was starting to get dark out. Other than the two at the table, the whole place was empty.

"- and, like, this what my dad told me — my cousin I guess kind of had a fever or something? And so my aunt gave her an aspirin. And, I mean, like, the warning labels literally say "don't give this to people under 18 or else you might kill them," but I guess... I guess she thought the risk was, you know, negligible. And, I mean, there's only like two cases of Reye Syndrome per year, so like, I get it, you know?

"A few days later, my cousin's in the hospital. She isn't well. They don't know what's wrong with her. She's, you know - yeah." Heidi shrugged, shook her head, and glanced down at the table. "The next day, she starts having seizures. Then, the day after that, she's in a coma. Then two days later, she's gone.

"I had to sit way in the back for her funeral, because I was... I was scared of seeing her in the casket. I was scared of seeing her corpse. I'd never seen a dead person before, and I didn't know anything about funerals yet. It was kind of... I was scared that I'd see her rotting, I guess. I don't know."

She inhaled quietly and then exhaled.

"That was twelve years and like five or six funerals ago, and it's not even the most fucked up death in my family, but it still... it still fucks me up sometimes. Like, sometimes I'll just be sitting there and the thought just kind of pops into my mind that, like, hey, Ellie'd be old enough to learn how to drive now, you know? Like, she'd be at the part of her life where she'd be... starting to understand herself. Like, she'd be starting to become her own person now, I guess. And it's hard not to think about that. It's hard. It's just, it's, you know,"

She sniffled quietly. Her head slumped down.

"- Sorry. It's just hard. I mean, every day's always hard. But sometimes they're harder than others."

---

Suddenly, as the bottle stopped at Greg, he pushed himself to his feet.

He understood, in that moment, that he'd just lost.

There was a bang and a flash of fire from Salem's hand.

Greg's glasses flew into the wall behind Jacob's head.

He was already dead by the time he landed back in the chair.

S131: Deceased

It took Jacob a second to process what had happened. Why a loud bang had echoed through the room, why his face was suddenly damp, why Greg had slumped over in the chair like that.

"... Greg?"

It was already too late. Jacob knew that, awash as he now was with a splattering of Greg's blood. He knew he should be bolting out the door or up the stairs. He knew that there was nothing he could do and going towards Greg was likely suicide.

But he couldn't help himself from rushing to his side. In that moment, self-preservation had become an afterthought.

"GREG!"

As he stood over the body, grabbing its shoulders and staring into its glassy eyes, he'd almost forgotten Salem was still there.

The kick of the rifle jolted Salem back in his chair, almost parallel to Greg. Equal but opposite reaction, Fullmetal-style. He stared straight ahead, making himself breathe in and out.

His thoughts were racing and distant at the same time. Frantic music muffled by cotton. He turned the rifle, laying it across his lap as he fished in his coat pocket for ammo to reload it. The heat of the barrel stung his fingers, making him jerk back and hiss, but he slotted the bullet home; in the moment his eyes had dropped from Greg's body, Jacob had rushed in.

It gave Salem pause enough to just sit there for a moment, watching and cradling the rifle. The leg tucked underneath him was starting to fall asleep, he became aware, and adjusted the way that he was sitting accordingly.

If the bottle had ended up pointing at him, he might have shot himself. It would have been only fair.

Even if the aftermath tried to smother him, pulling the trigger got easier every time.

"Were you guys close?" He asked Jacob. His finger curled around the trigger again, but he didn't bring the rifle up yet.