Survival Of The Fittest

When Gale clicked on the stream, she told herself she was ready. She could do it. She could watch anything, and she would be alright. It was thousands of miles away and a year in the past and she was only looking because she had to know, had to understand the horrors of the world more intimately, had to bring herself to know what it was she was afraid of so that she could prove to herself that she was in the right.

She wasn't ready.

After psyching herself up for a few hours, she'd decided to preview things. It was Friday night, and her parents would be gone all day tomorrow, so she'd just watch a little tonight to ready herself for the big plunge in the morning. She'd found a guide that promised to take her right to the deaths, and she'd picked the very first one, ready to watch some boy a few years older than her on his brief, doomed trek across an island, ready to observe whatever horrible end he met (her guide promised no spoilers, and it sickened her that people cared about such things), but what she was not ready for was for the stream to cut in precisely where it did.

The boy—her boy? The one who was doomed?—was lying face down in the mud, as a girl swept belongings from his bag to hers, and Gale thought he'd wake up any moment, that was how this worked, people woke up and then...

And then she registered the bat, the blood, the little spasms wracking his body, and he was already dead, she'd not gotten to know him, hadn't gotten to brace herself, he was just a corpse and he'd never be anything else even if she went back and looked at whatever had come before, and she recoiled physically from her computer and tilted her chair back on its hind legs, the same way she often balanced on it but with no thought this time, no intent, and so her momentum carried her further and she toppled and hit the back of her head on the floor, sending a lance of pain and light and gratitude that her room was carpeted all through her skull, and still she thought for a moment that she was shattered and dead just like he was.

"Abby?" Jessie's voice, from the room across the hall. Gale's eyes widened as she scrambled upright and clawed at the keyboard of her computer. Her door was locked, and it wasn't supposed to be, and she could hear her sister's footsteps approaching. "Are you okay?"

Alt+Space+N, and the stream vanished.

"I'm fine," she shouted. She sounded pained even to herself.

"I heard..."

"I fell off my chair," Gale said. She was darting towards the door now, had to beat her sister to it so it wasn't locked. Locked would be a signal that something was wrong. Her hand closed around the knob and as she turned it the lock popped, really loudly to her ears, and there was Jessie with her hand outstretched and a frown on her face but she didn't say anything about the lock sound. Maybe she hadn't heard?

"I'm fine," Gale repeated. Her chair was still lying on its back on the floor, her computer dimmly glowing in the background, sitting on the desktop. Her blinds were drawn, the room gloomy. Nothing suspicious going on there. Her breath was fast, her forehead sweaty. Please, Jessie, she thought, please think it's porn. Please please please think I was watching porn and don't push it.

Jessie frowned, her forehead did that wrinkly thing that made her look just like Mom, and then she said, "You should be more careful. You could get hurt."

"I know," Gale said, "I'm sorry, I don't even think about it."

"Just be careful," Jesse said, and turned and went back to her own room, to whatever she was doing. Gale slowly let the door swing closed and took big deep breaths. It was okay. She'd gotten away with it.

Her head throbbed like the boy's crushed-up skull. Abel Zelenovic. Gale had no idea how to pronounce that last name. The girl who'd killed him, the girl with the bat, she looked kind of like Jessie, if Jessie was dressed up like an old lady or a girl from the 1920s or something. The girl had killed someone just like that, but she looked like Jessie so it was hard to imagine, and Gale thought maybe she'd wind the stream back and see and she thought maybe she'd just let it be and never watch any more because she'd seen it now, she knew it was real now, it was all she'd heard and more and worse and she was right to be afraid and Jessie was a junior and next year it'd be her going on a senior trip, going just to spite Gale under the guise of proving it was okay, and it could be Jessie with the bat and that was all Gale needed to know.

She didn't go back to her computer until the next morning, when it was all quiet and still.

"Guess who?"

The girl's voice was high and pretty, mostly, but there was just a bit of rasp to it, just a hint of imperfection. It felt late but it wasn't—maybe nine in the morning. Her parents had left an hour and a half ago, and Jessie was wrapped up in something in her room, ignoring Gale like usual.

Gale was still full from last night. Dinner had been really tasty. Maybe Jessie had said something to Mom because it had been macaroni and cheese, Gale's favorite. Mom always made it from scratch, and because of that Gale couldn't eat boxed mac and cheese without being disappointed in it. Technically, the mac and cheese was the side dish, served alongside rotisserie chicken, but Gale didn't like chicken so she just took scoop after scoop of pasta and her parents didn't mention it. She was skinny enough, they often said, that she could use the calories. She'd slept well, all things considered, the death something she'd managed to put out of mind.

Gale had been feeling good enough to think maybe she didn't have to go back to the stream, but that also meant she was feeling good enough that she could return to it. So now, here she was, watching the second death. Toby Underwood. She had watched just a bit from earlier, and he seemed like a jerk. He'd shot someone, by mistake it seemed like, and then had shot up a bag on purpose. Gale couldn't really go that hard on him, though, because she knew from her list that the person he'd shot wasn't dead yet, and also because Toby was pretty handsome.

She shouldn't be thinking like that. She knew right away that was a mistake, just like it was a mistake to be thinking that she was kind of about the same height as the cute girl putting her hands over Toby's eyes. She wondered what the girl's name was, just as that was answered.

"Hey, Tirzah." Toby smiled and took her hand and continued:

"Too bad we don't have some drinks and a boombox or something. Maybe we can have some airdropped in."

He let her hand free, and crossed his arms. Gale scratched at the side of her stomach, hiking up her shirt a little. She had a matching flannel pajama set that she'd had for a couple years now and still made her feel very middle school, but it was comfy. The girl—Tirzah—didn't really look like a senior, at least not her face. She looked like she could be in class with Gale, or just a bit older.

"Or at least go for a swim," Toby added. "I have a change of clothes, what about you?"

"Yeah," Tirzah said. "We don't need swim suits though, right?"

Oh.

Oh.

It was going to be that sort of thing? Gale was expecting a lot of possible things but this was not really one she'd been counting on. She guessed it made sense, right? Because they were going to die, and they knew it, and they were trying to pretend but they knew it, and if she was going to die, well, she might just...

The fingers of her left hand slipped under the elastic of her pajama bottoms, her palm pressed gently against her belly.

"Nah, we can just go in as-is," Toby said, and then smirked. "Or, if you don't mind the cameras..."

Tirzah leaned in and pressed her lips to the corner of his eye. Gale's fingers slipped under the waistband of her underwear.

"You know," Tirzah said, her voice sounding oddly ragged, "someday—"

And just let that, she blew Toby's head off.

Gale sat there, staring, hand down her pants. She sat for a long time. Tirzah slumped down, murmuring to herself so quietly it was hard to hear.

"I don't like this," she said. Her fingers were entwined with the body's. "I don't..."

Gale didn't either. But what, precisely, had she been expecting? She'd clicked knowing it was a death, Toby's death, and she'd been about to...

She jerked her hand free, smacked it against her desk, but quietly because she didn't want to make another sound and she didn't really want to actually hurt herself.

She felt like the stupidest, evilest person in the entire world.

She checked the list.

Two down, one hundred and fifty-six to go.

Gale's battle station was a laptop on a desk, very very clean but also personalized. It was not sterile at all. The back of her computer was plastered in all sorts of Pokemon stickers she had collected from here and there, and next to it was her suitcase turntable, which she'd considered adorning the same but hadn't because she wasn't sure if it would affect the acoustic qualities in some arcane way and also because she carried that around with her sometimes and endless Pokemon stickers wasn't quite in keeping with the refined musical image. Her player wasn't a Crosley, but was pretty much the off-brand equivalent, and it plugged into her laptop via a USB cable. It could rip from vinyl to MP3, but tended to produce a very noticeable hissing sound when it did so.

She had a few figurines on her desk, all nicely dusted. Dr. Wily held his fist high, menacing. Bowser loomed behind him. Her real collection, though, lived in the net above her bed. She had a few dozen Pokemon plushes, accumulated over the last few years as gifts and purchases. Whenever she had a few dollars, and the family went to the mall or to Target, she would look through the aisles for a new friend to bring home. Often, she struck out. There had been a long dry spell as the license passed from Tomy to Wicked Cool Toys, a company which had a really insufficient internet presence. From time to time, Gale wanted something particularly special that could only be acquired online, and she had to order it from the Pokemon Center website. That was what she'd had to do for her Furret, which was almost two feet long and had a rod running through the inside of its body that let her curl and pose it. Gale's pets were on a rotation, from net to bed and back again, but not Furret. Furret was always on the bed, or on Gale's lap.

Gale was squeezing Furret and sobbing quietly, apologizing.

She hadn't meant for it to happen. She'd been so upset about what she'd seen with Toby that she'd tabbed out again for a bit and she'd needed something to make her feel better so she'd gotten Furret to hold in her lap while she looked over Pokemon tier lists, but she'd been drawn back to the streams, hadn't even closed them, just gone to a new tab, and then she'd been watching the next one, skipping all the preamble and just cutting straight to where it all got real.

The fight just seemed sort of silly at first. The girl had shouted about being the strongest in the world. Gale knew she was going to watch Christine Bright die, and she hoped right away that the girl shouting wasn't her. There were some other people there, including these two other less distinct and interesting girls, and Gale thought, let one of them be Christine. Then she felt like trash right away, like all it took to win her loyalty and sympathy was saying one goofy thing, like those other girls somehow mattered less just because they'd failed to entertain Gale in the first thirty seconds she watched them desperately living out the last hours of their lives. And then, there was the large boy, the pushing and shoving and they were wrestling on the ground and it could've been any fight at school. Gale had seen them, from time to time, and it was that sort of adolescent tussle, it seemed, and she couldn't imagine how this could kill anyone and then the boy bit Christine's throat out.

Oh, Gale thought, I guess that's why Bite is a Dark type attack. It had never made that much sense to her before, because lots of animals used their teeth to fight, and it was natural. Dark was the English name for the Pokemon type, but from Japanese it translated more or less to "evil," meaning Bite was an evil attack.

She'd believe that, now.

Gale was stunned, just about to really let the horror and the aftermath sink in, when she realized something: she was holding Furret so it faced the screen. She'd made it watch too.

That was when the apologies had burst from her in a flood. She was stupid, she knew, so stupid. Furret was a toy. It was cloth and stuffing formed around a plastic rod, no more alive than her computer. Its eyes were embroidery, and she knew that, but it didn't matter, just like it didn't matter when she was sad or angry or scared and hugged it close to help her feel better. It was something pure and innocent, part of a world she'd lived in for a long time before getting dragged out of, one she still had one foot in some of the time, and it was horrible and wrong for her to cross those spheres, to taint one of the only unambiguously good things in her life, and she whispered her apologies to it again and again as she stumbled to her bed and hugged it close, and she didn't know quite for sure if she was apologizing to Furret or to herself.

When Gale's parents came home that night, they found her sullen and withdrawn. She picked at her dinner, but she didn't eat to any meaningful degree. She hadn't showered—she was, in fact, still in her pajamas.

Jessie was no help. She'd been in her room all day, and she could vouch for the fact that Gale had been too, aside from some stops in the bathroom. Nothing alarming had seemed to happen, though she did mention the fall the day before.

For Gale's part, she'd made it farther, but with ever-diminishing valor and fortitude. By the end, she'd been avoiding the deaths rather than seeking them out, any gore she caught incidental. And still the images haunted her, flashes of gunfire in the dark, a room full of people retching and clasping at their stomachs.

She'd slept fine the night before, but now the images lingered, and in her dreams she was there too, being chased, knowing she had to kill and knowing she couldn't. There were voices crushing and screaming all around her, and she hugged Furret close and that almost helped.

It was late July before she managed to admit to her therapist what had happened.