Survival Of The Fittest

((Marshall West continued from First Mover Advantage.))

Marshall drummed his fingers against the dining room table as he stared at his math book. He could almost feel the missing digits tapping the wood when his stumps twitched over it. Only the missing beat of the drumming gave it away.

Aside from that, everything was silent. There wasn’t even ticking anymore. Marshall hadn’t asked what happened to the clock. He only knew that it was gone.

Between the game and the time at the base he’d completely ruined his studying schedule. Now that he was here, he couldn’t seem to remember how to focus. Going back to school was going to be hard. He knew they said he didn’t have to… but he couldn’t think of what else he should be doing.

As he stared blankly at his math book, he heard footsteps thundering outside. Instinctively, Marshall jumped to his feet and grabbed the nearest item to raise it like a shield - that item being the math book itself, not much of a weapon.

His father burst through the door, wheezing for breath.

“Oh.” Marshall looked at his father, then the book, then put it down quickly before he fixed a smile on his face. “You’re home early!”

His father doubled over, catching his breath, before he choked out, “Heard the news.”

“What news?”

“You haven’t–-” Dad straightened up, staring at Marshall with incredulity, before he reached up and rubbed his face. “No… you always do get so focused… no-one called?”

“I switched the phone off after those conspiracy people kept calling. Dad. Why’d you run back?”

Instead of responding, his father picked up the remote and turned on the little television perched in a corner of the kitchen. It only took a moment of cycling for him to find what he was looking for. A news program, clearly rehashing something that had already been announced earlier.

“--streams allegedly depicting the kidnapping of the students of John Endecott High School, fourteen of whom were rescued last month and recently returned home, have appeared across the internet, throwing into question the fate of the Arthro Taskforce, and bringing up the possibility of future attacks despite the recent military success–-”

Marshall could hear a thumping in his ears. A wave of nausea crashed through his stomach, and he was breathing too hard, too short.

He could see his father’s mouth moving. Could see the newsreel going with footage of the other survivors, and pictures of the deceased - nothing of the actual stream itself, no, that would have been too tasteless, but–-

There was a hand on his shoulder, and Marshall immediately shook it off and took a few steps back.

He felt his mouth make the shapes of “I’m fine,” but he didn’t hear it. Even when he repeated it, over and over, as if that would make it true, he still didn’t hear it.

He felt cold. Too cold for a Salem winter.

The first cognizant thought was that he wanted a cigarette.

The second was that he needed his father’s laptop. That was the thought that spurred him into action. It wasn’t far. Sitting on a shelf. Marshall snatched it, opened it, waiting for the seeming age it took to boot up. He still couldn’t hear anything.

His father hovered nearby, hands half-extended towards the laptop, unsure.

Simply searching the stream turned up nothing on the search engine. That made sense. No normal search engine would want to taint its results with streams of children getting murdered. But opening the browser brought up… an odd search history. Specific terms, specific sites, all of them labeled with variations of ‘Version 8.’

He didn’t think too hard about it. He just started clicking them one by one, and it didn’t take long for the streams to start appearing. Streams and bootlegs of the streams, his classmates scattered all over.

He knew that snow.

He kept clicking.

He knew that lake.

He kept clicking.

There. Chloé. Kai. Standing on the edge of a lake, Kai starting a fire while Chloé’s focus was on the two figures out on the lake, and Marshall knew those sopping wet twintails, too. Jess.

If he kept watching, he’d see where Jess had gone. He’d see where he’d gone wrong. If he should have gone left or right, if he’d nearly found her or missed her by miles.

And next time–

A hand slammed the laptop shut. Marshall blinked a few times, the imprints of the snow left on his eyes, then he looked up. His father looked back, knuckles white as he pressed down on the laptop.

The thumping in Marshall’s ears was still going, but words started to come in over it.

“--can’t look.”

“Why not?” Marshall asked flatly. “I already lived it. Why can’t I look?”

His father pulled the laptop away from him and turned to take it out of the room.

“How come you get to look? I followed your searches!” Marshall said, standing up. “You were going to watch!”

His father’s shoulders tensed, but he didn’t say anything before leaving to hide the laptop.

Marshall left the house not long after, though not before borrowing one cigarette and his father’s lighter from where he knew he kept them. He’d pay his father back later for it, he told himself.

Marshall wasn’t sure how people managed to smoke on the regular. It confused him, even as tried. He was pretty sure he was hacking up so much of it that none of it was actually staying inside.

But it did make him feel warmer.

As he tried to keep the smoke down, he watched the house down the street. He tried to remain in a spot where no-one would see him from the windows easily if they looked out.

Considering it was Matthew’s house he was looking at, that felt smart. Even if, realistically, Matthew wouldn’t have a rifle anymore. Even if the biggest danger Matthew could perform now was the leaking of personal information.

Really, he didn’t think Matthew deserved to be checked on. But he’d tried to make himself the media’s darling. He was in the public consciousness, for better or for worse. That meant, if the terrorists were back and wanted to finish what they started… it would make sense to grab Matthew quick and early.

Like it or not, Matthew was one of their classmates. Marshall wouldn’t want him back in the game… if only for the sake of anyone there with him.

What if he didn't come out? What would he do next? Knock on the door? He didn’t think Matthew would welcome him. Especially not after the press conference.

Before he could think on it further, he saw movement. It turned out to just be a man taking out the trash. Not Matthew, but one Marshall recognised from seeing a glimpse of him at the base when the families had arrived to be there over Christmas. Matthew’s father, most likely.

If the father was calm, it meant Matthew was likely still accounted for. Since Marshall had shot his son, he decided it would be best to leave before he was noticed.

The nausea in his stomach lessened, but it didn’t vanish.

Marshall exhaled, though it was followed by coughing. He covered his mouth until the hacking stilled before wandering in search of somewhere he could responsibly discard the rest of the cigarette.

The thing about his father? His only child had, until now, been perfectly obedient. Marshall hadn’t even tried to take a peek at Santa back when he believed in him. That meant no instincts for hiding things that might have developed over the long, torrential childhood of a more difficult child.

This meant that Marshall found the laptop again mere moments after his father was out of the house. Alongside a whole lot of ticket stubs and pamphlets for races and sports that gave away interests he never knew his father had possessed.

Marshall chose not to mention that discovery, lest his access to the laptop be barred again.

Whenever his father was out of the house - and that was most of the time, because trauma didn’t eliminate the household need for funds, which seemed more worse-off than ever - Marshall stared at that laptop, and burned the game into his eyes.

At night, he made excuses, and left the house to check that his classmates hadn’t vanished. From a distance. Always from a distance. Eventually he would see movement - or in one case, be shooed away by a cop who didn’t realise his focus was on a nearby window, and had thus simply accused him of loitering.

That first day, he watched a clip of Aracelis bludgeoning Constance to death, after Leslie had robbed her and started the avalanche that led all three of them to that position. That night, Marshall stared at Aracelis’ window until the early hours of the morning.

The second day, he watched Jess leave the room while he, Chloé and Kai quarreled. Watched her freeze to death, spotting himself on the streams wandering close and far to where she had been, oblivious to how close she had been at times. No-one in those clips was alive to check on, except himself. But he also saw one of his lacrosse teammates, Tull, get shot in the back with a sniper rifle. So he stood outside Russell’s house instead that night.

He saw Dominiqua gunned down by DeMarcus, and had no-one - friend, victim, killer, anyone - to check on, and picked David at random. He’d stolen a few cigarettes from his father at this point, lighting and smoking and coughing a little less as he tried to keep warm in the Salem winter, not island cold but still cold.

Not for the first time, on that fourth day he saw Joshua James kill a girl. And lie, seemingly for fun, that he’d killed Amy as well. It wasn’t even the worst thing he had done in those four days. Wouldn’t be the worst, either. Marshall had physically thrown up watching him at one point - but that might have been too much cigarette smoke. That night, he staked out Amy’s home.

Fifth day, he fell asleep at the laptop. He might have dreamed the murders he saw that day, and even if he hadn’t it was starting to mush together. He wasn’t eating much. Sleeping worse than ever.

When he went outside to continue smoking and try to remove the chill that had nothing to do with the weather, one of the conspiracy theorists who’d been calling the house found him out there. Marshall had to jog around the block a few times just to escape him. His lungs hadn’t liked that. But could he complain about the stalkers when he was doing the same for his classmates, albeit for a better reason? Who had he even followed that night?

Sixth day… sixth day… what had been then? June… he’d seen June cry for some reason and he couldn’t remember why. Had he been asleep at that point, too? And Andrew had fallen into a pit. Marshall had seen who made them. So much for thinking perhaps Shawn had abandoned Matthew out of standards.

Seventh day… Chloé.

When he’d gone outside that day, the conspiracy theorist had been back and told him that there was clear CGI involved. Marshall might have said something about showing the theorist how real the wounds on his hands were up close, and then tried to punch him. Or he dreamt it. He was pretty sure it happened, but no-one had pulled him up on it yet. Lack of witnesses? Maybe the theorist was biding his time?

He’d seen Kai kill, too. There had been a tendency, when Kai was on screen, for Marshall to often pause the stream and just… look. No reason, except to make sure he remembered what Kai looked like.

He watched Juanita’s window that night. Maybe. Did he? Someone’s window… was hers the day after, maybe?

…

…He was having trouble distinguishing days.

He knew that he’d plugged the phone back in at some point. He hadn’t touched social media, and his father needed ways to contact him while at work. Most of the calls were nonsense.

When he’d got one from his uncle that hadn’t been, he’d definitely been watching a clip of June sprinting away, while Darryl and Richard stayed behind.

It was horrible to think, after seeing so much of what his classmates had done, and what had never been mentioned by the terrorists over the announcements, only to be shown to the people at home… that he’d wondered if June’s explanation of how they’d died had been the whole truth. Them telling June to run, and not being able to run themselves. Because he was learning that often, when people said ‘it wasn’t my fault’ out of nowhere, it often meant that it was.

But it had been. One event, at least, where how she’d described it was exactly how it had happened, and Marshall hated that he’d doubted her, even for a second.

He’d muted the footage as Katelyn picked through the remains, and listened to his uncle instead, and insisted that he was fine. That, no, he just hadn’t been picking up because of the unplugged phone. No, the calls weren’t the worst, just annoying. No, his father hadn’t said anything about borrowing money.

He’d listened to his uncle, promised to call if things got bad, then hung up.

He hadn’t talked much to his father that night before leaving, using the same lies he always did about seeing a friend.

He swiped the rest of his father’s cigarettes on the way out, and decided that he didn’t care if he noticed.

The night that Marshall chose June’s house to stakeout, it was the night that marked the eleventh since the stream had started being aired. That meant the stream was nearly over.

What happened once they reached the end?

Maybe nothing would happen at all. Or maybe that’s when they’d come back and finish what they started.

He hadn’t slept at all last night, and hadn’t returned home either.

June lived in a nice neighborhood. It reminded Marshall of distant memories when his family had been wealthier. There weren’t really any places to sit, but he’d found a tree to settle by. His fingers itched to reach for the cigarette packet as he watched her house… but he thought he might get noted as a loiterer. That’d happened a couple of times already, and he didn’t want to get chased out.

Really… he could probably just knock on the door and check. June was the only one he’d kept in contact with after leaving the base.

But he hadn’t brushed his hair and he smelt like a couch. That might get a pass since June had seen him shoot a man, but turning up because he couldn’t shake the idea that this wasn’t over… He’d probably stress her out. He’d definitely stress her parents out. He had that effect on people.

Besides. It was his job to worry. That way she wouldn’t have to. If he kicked down the door, that would defeat the purpose.

Marshall rested against the tree and pulled his legs up to his chest as he gazed at the house. It looked blurry. Was he too far away?

He closed his eyes for a moment.

“You thought you’d escaped?”

A voice that had been drilled into his mind across twelve days of announcements, mocking the deaths of his classmates.

But when Marshall’s eyes flickered open again, it was Kai’s face staring back down at him, Tracen’s voice blaring out of it like it was coming out of a megaphone. The room around them was dark.

“Think again, children! We have a finale to catch up on-–”

Marshall sat up with a start, eyes blinking. It was… dark? Sunset? No screen in front of him. He focused back on June’s window.

Just… had to keep his eyes open, had to–-

The warped Kai had a television remote in his hand - or at least Marshall’s mind processed it that way, though in actuality it was a math book - and he pressed it, finger digging into the letter A, before screens lit up all around them.

The briefing had been one screen, with two kids from the last game.

This time, it was millions of them, stacked and mixed up, playing all the clips he’d been viewing back to back.

“And if you think of disobeying

Marshall nearly toppled over from his seat against the tree. He sat up again and pushed himself back against it, trying to jab himself with one of the knobbly bits so it would keep him awake.

you know exactly what will happen, don’t you?”

The warped Kai in front of him made a finger gun action at his head, and his throat burst in a spray of red, coating Marshall in it. But he stayed standing, stayed grinning with a smile that was not Kai, someone else’s smile on Kai’s face along with the voice.

“There won’t be anyone to die for you this time.”

He saw himself on one of the screens, coated in blood as he was now.

Then he was in the snow, which was slick and bloody-–

No screens. No snow. He was cold. But no snow. He checked his skin, and found it clean of blood.

He lowered them, his eyes flickering shut again, almost bringing back the dream. He shook himself awake, then started slapping his face.

“Can’t fall asleep. Can’t fall asleep,” he grumbled, smacking himself a few more times for good measure. “Can’t until-–”

The sound of a car rolling up next to him. Perhaps a policeman had been called? Or was it something–

“Marshall?”

The voice was somehow both loud yet uncertain. It came from a thin, blonde - yet greying - woman who sat in the driver’s seat.

“It is you! Good, your father wasn’t sure where you might have gone, but he said you’d mentioned a ‘friend’ and that you seemed close to the June girl you were on the news with. He thought I’d have more luck bringing you back.”

“Stop shouting, you’re making a scene. I don’t know you,” Marshall said, the woman’s voice like knives in his ear as he rubbed his eyes. “Are you a friend of my father’s?”

“No. No, definitely not.” She leaned forward, a frown on her face. “You don’t… recognise me?”

Marshall squinted at her for a few moments. Trying to subtract the gray from her hair, seeing if that produced anything, much like how doing so to his father resulted in them resembling each other down to everything but the volume.

…

He knew this woman. Once, he had known her as Mom. Now…

Something stirred in the same area of his gut where he kept the anger that he held for Matthew, and Evie, and the survivors that had lived after killing his friends, and himself.

Now she was just a stranger named Clara.

Marshall turned his head away.

“I don’t know you,” he repeated. “And I was taught by someone who’s since left my life to never get in a car with a stranger.”

Clara’s mouth tightened and she went pink in the face, but she sighed after.

“If you insist. But you shouldn’t be sleeping in an unknown neighborhood late at night, it’s dangerous. I assure you that you have his permission to get in the car.”

“I’m not sleeping. I’m busy. Go away.”

“Marshall–”

“Why are you here now?” As Marshall spoke, he kept his eyes on June’s house. “Why does it take a kidnapping and near-death experience to get you to even visit me? And even now, you haven’t called, didn’t show at the base. You’re only turning up because Dad asked? Because I don’t want to talk to him either. Not right now.”

“Why not?”

Because he wasn’t stupid, and he’d pieced together all the little pieces around the home to know where his father’s money was, and what he’d been trying to bet on. And he didn’t have words for what feeling that filled him with.

But he didn’t have time to even decide if he wanted to explain that, because that was when movement became evident around the Madison home.

((Marshall West continued elsewhere.))