Survival Of The Fittest

((Jessica Romero continued from Silurian))

They hadn't found anyone since resolving to help the people they found, and Jessica couldn't stop feeling disappointed at that. Because there would have been people out there, people like she and Beatrice—never Bea, she had been clear on that—who were lost and needed someone there be their rock or anchor. But the deaths had piled up, never slowing and as a result, the island had become a much emptier and more inhospitable place. It had never been welcoming but with the trappings of civilization it possessed and the consistent noises of other people moving around, fighting, and dying it at least felt alive. In the time they had been up on the mountain, however, a lot had changed. A lot of the paths they walked and places they looked were empty save for the bodies. The sounds of battle, of guns, shouting, and running in the undergrowth had all vanished while they had been away. Somehow without the constant low level of distant the island felt even more eerie, and more out of touch with the modern day.

It had resulted in Jessica and Beatrice doing a lot of walking without anything to show for it, despite Jessica's certainty that people who weren't killers and needed help were out there somewhere. But the number of people without blood on their hands was dwindling as everyone looked to get the one kill they needed in order to be granted an exodus from the island. Jessica herself was counted among that group who qualified for an exit from the island if they were able to win, but Beatrice wasn't, it was an issue she hoped they didn't have to find a solution for.

They were following the road, heading towards the town, with the idea of investigating the houses to search for people as it seemed like the most logical place for people to be camped out and hiding. The weather had eased off somewhat so they weren't snowed out of traveling which was good, as it stopped them from being stuck wasting days in one place.

"Hey, Beatrice, want to stop for a moment?"

((Beatrice Briggs continued from This Version of You))

Back on the road again, a bittersweet air hanging over them.

They hadn’t bumped into a single other soul on their trek back down to earth, that was unavoidable fact. Their goal was to lend their aid, wherever they could, a plan which hinged on there actually being people to help out, and Beatrice couldn’t lie and say it wasn’t a little disheartening that they hadn’t been able to offer even a single word of encouragement to anyone yet.

She had managed to listen to part of the announcements, now, as well. She had still needed to cover her ears at the screeching din of them starting up and winding down, but Jessica had been able to let her know when she could tune back into the real world this time. The announcements would play, and names would be listed off, and the island would grow just a little more empty, with or without her listening, of course.

It was important to start listening to them, though. So she could know who there was left that she could try and find, who there was left to try and talk to. Even when it made her heart ache to hear the names of the members of the lacrosse team rattled off, that her friends had taken someone’s life, for whatever reason.

She had to remind herself that it wasn’t all doom and gloom, though, even if it looked that way on the surface. Her conversation with Jessica while leaving the hot springs hadn’t just been a one-off fluke, they had continued to talk all the way down. It had been more along the line of functional discussions - where to head to next, making sure they weren’t about to step onto a patch of black ice - but even then, they had managed to keep things flowing, talking about what they thought the places they hadn’t been to yet would be like, and pointing out landmarks like the downed plane and the old church off in the distance.

And it was important to keep things in perspective. They had just come from the top of a mountain, after all. People didn’t normally gravitate towards such harsh locales for safety and shelter, they would have headed towards the town, or the research station. You used the mountain roads only if you needed to get from point A to point B - like K had presumably been doing - or if you needed something specific from the peaks themselves. Just like they had gone up there for.

There was no point beating themselves up or losing all hope because they hadn’t seen anyone yet. It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying, after all. That was all they could do; their utmost. She knew she was putting 100% in. She was certain Jessica was too.

“Sure, that sounds good.”

Beatrice put her hands on her knees, squatting slightly, taking deep, slow breaths in and out.

“We must’ve walked… well, I don’t know how far we’ve come, actually. A long way. Better to take a break now then to collapse in another mile or so.”

((Salem Fox continued from Trigger Happy Havoc))

Salem hadn't realized how easy it was to fall into a routine even here until he spotted the two figures on the road ahead of him. His mind had been wandering a bit, sure. He kept coming back to the look on Shu's face in the moments right before and right after Shu pulled the trigger. But he'd also just walked this road enough times now for it to be familiar, and he'd started to zone out a little just like on the drive home from school.

He paused, assessing the two people in the distance. Girls, he guessed, but that might have been as much a sense of vibes as appearance at a distance. No immediate identifiers to tell him who; he ran through a mental checklist of names and faces that immediately came to mind.

...Hm, Beatrice? Beatrice was a pretty big girl, that seemed like a good bet. Physically built but timid had always been Salem's read, and maybe that mattered less now than it had before, but it informed him that she and whoever she was with probably weren't on the prowl. The other girl at least looked too short to be Evie, and the hair was too long to be Juanita, and obviously it wasn't Kitty, so that about cleared up the list of reasonable concerns.

So that was step 1 taken care of. Step 2: Salem hefted the rifle and stepped off the road and into the trees.

Everything he'd done up until now had been close-quarters, and honestly he was getting kind of tired of it. The Mountaineer may not have been a sniper, but it could still do well with some target practice.

After watching for a minute more to make sure that the girls were still focused away from him, Salem began moving through the trees in their direction.

“We did a loop from the town up the mountain and back down so,” Jessica dropped her bag at the base of an encroaching tree and adjusted her grip on the rifle. “Probably done the whole island at this point.”

Rays of light gently flickered along with the swaying of the tree branches in the breeze. The snow and wind were tapering off, whatever storm that had been attempting to assert its influence upon the island had failed in its attempt and retreated. The break in the weather was appreciated as Jessica had been growing tired of having to March through the layers of sleet and ice that coated the ground. Some remnants still remained on the cracked concrete of the road and dropped from thawing leaves, but the worst had clearly passed.

After looking around and being satisfied no one was around who was an immediate threat, Jessica sat herself on her bag, the butt of the rifle on the ground and forestock resting on the inside of her shoulder.

The only other noises around then were the sounds of the nearby forest, with occasional bird calls and the steady swaying of branches.

“Hey Beatrice,” She suddenly said as she continued to take in the way the forest was reclaiming the road. “What did you used to do at JEM? Like for sports?”

“Hmm? Oh, uh…”

The question had taken her slightly off-guard, more due to circumstance rather than the nature of the enquiry itself. She had been midway through her usual rest-stop preparations, her attention entirely focused on checking the immediate perimeter of their chosen location, peering around trees and into the undergrowth to make sure nobody was hiding out of immediate sight, axe clutched close to her chest the whole time. She had grown used to this being a solemn duty, carried out in silence.

But then again, that had summed up the entirety of their journey together up until very recently, hadn’t it? She wasn’t complaining about this change. Far from it; it was, for lack of any other better term, nice. Comforting, despite their surroundings. It really put a bow on (what Beatrice hoped she wasn’t being too presumptuous in calling) this friendship, it really made it feel as though they were actually working with each other, rather than just alongside one another. Besides, she hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary during her sweep of the area. It looked as though Jessica’s scouting had been blissfully uneventful too.

“Lacrosse! I was on the lacrosse team.”

Beatrice sat herself down, nestled in-between two sprawling roots, leaning her back against the thick trunk of the tree, angled so that she was facing towards Jessica. She lay her axe down across her lap, blade to the left, her hands gently resting on top of the handle.

“I played a lot of football when I was growing up, actually. Um, in the yard, I mean, with my brothers. Frederick and Marcus, and Seth once he was born. And my dad would be, um… He was a, uh, coach for a junior team, and he liked to play at that with us as well, I think.”

She smiled, and as she spoke, she ran her hands up behind her head, slipping her fingers into her hair tie and gently pulling it down and off her ponytail, bracing herself for the pins-and-needles-sensation of her hair on the back of her neck.

“I’d, y’know, hoped to play it properly at school, but, well…”

A grimace crossed her face. She doubted she needed to remind Jessica of exactly how lacking their school’s sports department was. She slipped the hair tie back over her wrist, pulling her hair up high and away from her back.

“Oh, but don’t get me wrong, I really loved being on the lacrosse team! It really, really made me feel like I was part of something good, this little, um, family, I suppose. Nobody there made fun of me - well, no, there was always teasing and ribbing, but nothing that ever made me feel like an outcast. I would’ve done anything for those girls. And I think they would’ve done the same for me.”

Beatrice let out a gentle sigh, looking past her friend for a moment, up towards the hazy slopes that they’d just descended.

“I told them that a lot. I told them how much they meant to me after every game, every training session. I don’t think it was ever enough. Now most of them…”

She took in a heavy, shaky breath. Lara was gone. Liya was gone. Juanita was… a concern. She sniffed twice, blinked thrice. She looked back at Jessica, hair as tidy as she could make it after days of open-air camping, and forced herself to put her game face back on.

“Well… Well, um, what about… what about you, Jessica? You said you did climbing. Did you do that a lot, back at school?”

The girls weren't moving into the trees as deeply as Salem had, saving him the trouble of having to bob and weave around to avoid being spotted. Beatrice spent a while looking into the underbrush, but Salem was approaching them at an angle, connecting the dots from tree to tree until he reached a good vantage point. If she did look his way, the vivid red of his skirt against the white, gray, and dark brown of the landscape probably would have given him away immediately, but for now, she and her friend seemed blissfully unaware.

It was like a moment out of Bambi, or some other heartwarming flick about cute wild animals. There was usually some scene with them being menaced by a hunter. In those scenes, there was always that moment where a twig snapped, and the deer's head snapped up with it, ears perked up. On alert and every muscle tensed to run.

The hunters in those movies were always human, but never human. Nobody ever talked about how people hunted for food, or to thin out prey animals to prevent them from wrecking the ecosystem, or whatever. At most, there would be some guy who just killed for the fun of it, because he hated cute heartwarming animals or because he wanted every room in his house to have a taxidermied deer head on the wall. Trophy hunters, people who just wanted another notch in their belt.

Salem was throwing in with their lot.

He knelt against the tree he'd picked, hissing softly through his teeth as the snow soaked through his skirt and into his leggings. The bite of the cold was fresh and real. If it stung, if it hurt, he was still alive.

He didn't have a perfect lineup on Beatrice, but she was broad-shouldered and directly between him and the other girl, facing away from him. Time seemed to slow down as he steadied the rifle in a way he hadn't had to bother with before; there was something a little meditative about it for that moment. Salem was aware of his own breathing, the line of the rifle from his shoulder to his hands down to the end of the barrel leading right to Beatrice's back where she sat framed between the trees.

He exhaled slowly. The white mist of his breath momentarily obscured Beatrice's form. His finger almost lazily came to rest on the trigger.

Jessica was surprised by how much she got out of Beatrice in response to her question. Although realistically maybe she shouldn’t have been. Maybe Beatrice had been waiting the whole time to have a proper conversation and it was only Jessica’s own antisocial nature that had prevented it.

It was nice though, to have the chance to listen to Beatrice speak about something that she enjoyed and was excited about. A topic that even if only for a brief moment took her mind off where they were. Jessica had never been interested in the lacrosse team, when given her choice of sports she had picked volleyball. It had been the most unique of the sports on offer at John Endecott, basketball was basketball and she wasn’t interested in it, knowing too much about how it worked. Lacrosse had also never appealed because it still felt similar enough to hockey or other team sports based on a pitch, at least to her anyway. But volleyball was different, it required completely different skills and had a totally different flow to games. It was its own thing and that was what attracted her to it. Once she’d started taking part she had found herself hooked.

“Yeah, I mean, I didn’t climb at school but I’ve been climbing since I was a kid, at JEM I was on the volley–“

The rest of Jessica’s sentence was cut off by the sudden explosion of the tree trunk next to her and Beatrice. A explosion of bark flew outward from the golf ball sized hole the bullet left behind, the shards scratching across her face as the retort of the shot followed just behind.

“Get down!” She yelled at Beatrice as she dropped to the floor, her hand already grabbing the Winchester rifle from where it sat against her chest, as soon as she hit the floor Jessica scanned for where the shot had come from.

Following the path from the where the bullet had whizzed between them Jessica saw their assailant. Curly blonde hair standing out against the dull grey brown of the trees and white of the snow. Jessica didn’t hesitate to get up into a crouch and send a reply his way. Without waiting to see if the first shot hit, she quickly fed another cartridge using the Winchesters lever mechanism and sent another shot towards Salem, then another, in an attempt to force him to retreat.

Beatrice breathed in the cold air, nodding along as Jessica started speaking, her attention solely focused on her friend now. The atmosphere had shifted, moved away from the picturesque snow capped forest to the awkward limbo late in the year, where the weather couldn’t decide if it was spring, autumn, or winter. She could feel her jeans growing damp, slush and dirt between her fingers, the great slow thaw happening around them. Her clothes were starting to feel especially gross, cloying to her body after a week without being removed. There was a constant pang of hunger, and of thirst, and of tiredness that neither sleep nor caffeine would fix. Her limbs ached, piercing right down to her bones, even more prominent now that she had laid them to rest.

But she felt relaxed nonetheless, for the second time in two days, at ease even when everything around her suggested that was an impossibility. It was a strange sort of calm, one where she knew the horrors that surrounded her, but that allowed her to feel prepared and ready to face them, to withstand them, to help those trapped within. She had a friend. She had a plan. She felt certain that they could take on anything, deal with any setback.

As if on cue, there one came. How easy, how quickly, that peace could be shattered.

Her yelp of fear was obscured by the explosion of bark and gunpowder, hands flying up to cover her head as splinters showered over her. She was paralyzed for a second, the shot having come right out of the blue, but Jessica’s frantic yell for cover was enough to break through to her. She dropped to the deck, dirt and sodden leaves sticking to her palms. She had no idea where their assailant was right now - the realisation that she had almost taken a bullet to the skull only just sinking in - she only knew that she had to move from where she was, right now.

Beatrice scrambled, round to the other side of the tree, pressing tight against it, back to the trunk once more, close enough that it started digging into her skin. She screwed her eyes shut, unable to stop herself from clapping her hands to her ears as another explosion rang out. She breathed heavy. She breathed hard. Her head was ringing.

Her eyes sprung wide open.

She wasn’t holding her axe anymore.

Fear’s icy hands gripped her tight as a second shot shattered the air into pieces.

It was harder to aim when the target wasn't as big or as close as Colm; there hadn't been so much distance with Greg, and they'd both been sitting. Maybe he ought to go back to the Mauser full-time and just rely on the good old up-close spray and pray. That was really the secondary of Salem's worries, but it was the first thing that ran through his head as he scrambled back to his feet and began to backpedal.

He hadn't seen the gun that the girls were also packing. His bandaged ear throbbed as though to remind him of what had happened the last time he made that mistake, and he shook his head to chase the feeling away with an irritated hiss as he ducked behind a new tree, a second shot whizzing past where he'd been standing moments before.

He finally caught sight of the other girl's face when he wheeled around to check where she was and if she was pursuing him. The other Jessica, the not-dead one, the one that had been on volleyball with Ash. The one that had killed on the first day, and killed again pretty soon after.

She didn't look as sorry about it as Colm had.

Salem pressed his thumb to his nose and blew a loud raspberry in her direction before darting off again.

He moved in an arc, rather than zigzagging straight from tree to tree. He didn't know if that was actually the better strategy to avoid getting shot, but it felt like it. As he closed in on the other side of where the girls had been sitting, he caught sight of Beatrice again, huddled against the opposite side of the very same tree she'd started with, hands clamped over her ears and looking like she was going to cry.

He didn't think twice about popping off another shot at her hunched figure before he retreated further back into the brush.

As Jessica fired at Salem, Beatrice scrambled through the dirt to safety. As she did so Jessica glanced over her shoulder to make sure she hadn't been shot as she ran. When she turned back around however Salem had vanished from his original position.

She quickly scanned across the treeline, but heard him before she saw him, the crunch of frost, leaves and branches under his feet as he ran around where they were. It took Jessica a few beats to locate him with her eyes, the curly shock of blonde hair once again assisting her. He was aiming at something but it wasn't her. He was targeting the only other person in the area.

"Bea—" Jessica shouted as she span around the tree and used all her weight and the gun she held to body-check Beatrice to the floor like they were on an ice rink.

The rest of her friends' name was stolen from her throat as the bullet from Salem's rifle passed through her chest. The force of it knocked Jessica sideways and she hit the tree with a heavy crunch, snapping free rotten pieces of bark before bouncing back and falling sideways onto the cold dirt.

Jessica lay there unable to move or breathe more than a shallow whisper.

"Bea? You okay?" She managed to croak out.

It was an awfully familiar sensation, this, sitting huddled with her hands clasped to the sides of her head, and one which she had hoped she’d seen the back of by now. The relentless, mounting dread had returned with a vengeance, alongside the blood rushing to her head, harrying her breath, filling her skull with painful white noise. Even with her eyes cracked open, she still couldn’t see anything - there was a mental disconnect, the objects in front of her failing to register within her vision.

The final crack of thunder was muffled, another salvo fired in the war raging a few feet to her right. She didn’t hear the sounds of twigs crunching underfoot, or of fabric rustling against itself, or of harried, desperate breathing at all.

The full force of Jessica slamming into her came out of nowhere, colliding into her body with the force of a truck, an ice-cold shock to the system that made her cry out in alarm as she was flung to the floor. For a moment, she thought that final volley had ended up hitting her - how was she to know what being shot felt like, after all? But the dull sensation from the collision had already started to fade, and the only pain that she could feel was the detritus that had once more dug into the soft flesh of her palms and flesh. There was no blood dripping from her stomach like she had feared, no patches of numbness or burning sensations.

She exhaled, a single sigh of relief. Then she heard it. The faint, hoarse voice of her friend. Beatrice spun around, face pale, knowing what she was about to see, unprepared to deal with it when she did.

“No, no no no, wait, no-”

Her hands clamped over her mouth, wide eyes transfixed on the dark red stain covering Jessica’s chest, slowly creeping wider and wider, dripping into the snow and dirt beneath her body. She was still for just a moment longer, frozen in place, stunned and rooted to the spot once more.

Not any longer. Not again. She couldn’t sit in silence and safety, consumed by terror when there were things she could do.

Beatrice’s hands fell away from her face as tears streaked down her cheeks to replace them, slowly edging closer to her friend.

“That’s… that’s not my…”

She bit her tongue hard, stopping herself mid stride. Like that mattered right now. Like anyone cared. For this moment, Jessica was the only thing of any importance. Their attacker could still be around and ready to fire again, already aiming down their sights. She would crawl to reach her friend’s salvation in that case, drag her weary legs and broken body across the finish line.

“Okay, okay, hold on, I’ll, I’ll move you somewhere safer, I’ll-”

No, no wait, you couldn’t move someone this grievously wounded could you? Not by yourself, certainly not without medical attention first, not without stemming the bleeding. She bit down hard again, trying desperately to stop her breathing from shaping into hyperventilating.

“I mean, um, I mean, hold this, okay, keep it pressed close to the, the wound-”

She unzipped her jacket as she spoke, frantically trying to tear it off of her body in order to hand it over.

“-and I’ll, um, I’ll grab the first aid stuff, okay Jess? Please just- just hold on, Jess, okay?”

Salem didn't look back to see if he'd hit either of the girls as he shoved his way through the brush and trees. No more shots fired in his direction, so it seemed like a good bet, but his work here was done either way. They were already fading from his thoughts as soon as they were out of his sight.

Shu's face rose in his mind again, the way his expression twisted when he shoved Salem away just before pulling the trigger.

If he kept moving, he could outrun it. That thought kept him going until the end of the road.

((Salem Fox continued in SLEEPING ON A BED OF THORNS))

"Bea," Jessica wheezed as Beatrice flustered and panicked tried to figure out what to do.

"Beatrice." She said, sterner. It felt bad, yelling—or at least as much of a yell as she could manage—but she needed to do it. Otherwise, Beatrice would have wound herself up so much she would have collapsed. Plus, Jessica knew, she could tell.

She'd been winded before, falling off a boulder. She had been trying a heel hook in an attempt to leverage herself onto a small ledge and had fallen. They'd been outside so there were crash mats and spotters, but the spotters hadn't been great and she'd landed back first on the edge of the mat. Her floating rib and solar-plexus took the brunt of the impact and she hadn't been able to breathe. Deep down, as she lay face down on her hands and knees she'd wondered if she was dying. After all, she wasn't able to breathe, now matter how desperate she was. In hindsight, it was a ridiculous thought, she had realised that later in the day, after she'd recovered and had gained a large purple splotch bruise across her side as a memento. But it didn't compare at all to the state she had been left in by Salem's bullet.

Her body kept trying to take in air but there was nothing entering or leaving her body. She could feel one of her lungs contracting and relaxing uselessly. Her chest felt constricted and no matter what she did she couldn't move. Her initial instinct was to panic, but, well, Beatrice was falling to pieces.

"Hey," She began, voice no more than a whisper, given she couldn't take any real air in. "Don't be sad...I'm going to...see Bekah."

She forced her body to take a large breath in and was rewarded by a painful wracking cough that brought up blood.

Jessica winced and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to keep herself calm even though she could feel the tears running down her face.

"I'll tell her...you're okay...that I kept you safe."

Her eyes started to close and as the sounds of Beatrice moving around her began to fade away, Jessica whispered out one final message. One for herself, to get it out into the world forever.

"I love you Maritza."

She heard her name, through the frantic rustling of fabric and through the mess of blood caught up in Jessica’s throat. Firm, as much as it could be in her current situation, the exact same intonation that the less sympathetic of her teachers used when they thought she wasn’t paying close enough attention. Her shoulders sagged. Her hands fell from the zipper of her jacket, leaving it still draped over her body like a shroud.

She knew instantly what the tone meant. Confirmation of what she had already suspected from the moment she’d laid eyes on her friend.

Beatrice took a deep, shaky breath, and shuffled closer instead, to the point they were both touching, her hands light against Jess’s shoulder. It was hard to look at her friend, from the bloodstain that now took up the vast majority of her chest, to her bone-white face drenched in sweat and tears, to the splatter that erupted from her mouth as she coughed and hacked and searched desperately for air. She forced herself, once again, to do so however, keeping her eyes locked with Jessica’s, even as the vision of the latter slowly faded away.

Her two friends were about to be reunited, somewhere that nobody could hurt them again. They would find safety and solace. They would know that Beatrice was still alive, still fighting, that she would take the bravery and strength that they had imparted upon her, and that she would never give up. It was enough, just about, for a smile to form on her face, and the upturned corners of her lips to taste the salty tang of her own tears.

It was over all too quickly, in the end. The heavy, rasping breathing fell silent. The painful-looking rise and fall of her chest came to a halt. Once more, she was left with the body of her friend, ready to be laid to rest in the forest by the side of the road. Now, though, she was facing it all by herself. For the first time, since she had been abandoned in the little office back in the town, she was alone.

She didn’t need to put on a brave face for anybody, right now. She knew, after all, how strong she could be. She wept openly, arms wrapped around her body as it folded in on herself, sobs wracking her body until it ached. There was no shame. No reason to hide it. Let the world hear the sorrow of a girl who had lost a dear friend.

Some time later, however long that might be, she had gotten to her feet again, unsteady, as though she had never used them before. She sniffed, and blinked away the threat of tears, eyes stinging red and raw. She looked down at Jessica’s body for a while, trying to measure out her breathing. She wished she could have made her friend’s body look more peaceful, lying here in a shower of bark and blood as it was. It felt wrong to touch it more than she already had, though. She didn’t want another ten-tonne weight in her backpack, like the Snuggie proved itself to be far too often.

Surrounded by trees, in peace and quiet, in the midst of nature in its most wild and true form? It was more than many could hope for anyway. More than many would receive.

She still had a couple of Jessica’s belongings kept close to her body, however. The axe had been replaced with the Winchester rifle in her hands, the melee weapon now occupying space in her bag, handle jutting out of the top. She had no experience with firearms, and precious little time to learn, but this firefight had shown clear enough that a big stick and a strong arm alone wouldn’t cut it. If she was lucky, she’d never have to seriously use it. But fortune, she knew, was not a reliable horse to bet on.

In her pocket, secured as tight as she could with a single button, nestled another lock of hair, ready to be released, to let Jessica fly again.

“Bye Jess.”

Beatrice took in another deep breath, turning it into a final, pained sigh.

“I think I might be seeing you again soon.”

She turned, ready to leave the forest and rejoin the road.

“But not without fighting as hard as I can to remain here first.”

((Beatrice Briggs continued in The World Has Been Changed (Do You Want To Save It?)))