SURVIVOR

Task Numero Uno: Build a darn shelter already. I'm getting bored, and the popcorn's gone.

"Alright then, dweebs." Jeff announced after he'd finished being pushed and pulled about by a bunch of idiotic, rage-filled twelve-year-olds. He seemed to have taken a liking to that place on the top of that ugly pink rock with the logs. "You know the drill, build shelters or whatever as a preliminary thing."

"That's not proper terminology!" The one who I had the vague remembrance of calling himself Simon whined, "This is atrocious!"

"LAAAAAAAME!" Maurice booed. Somebody threw a rock; this resulted in Simon passing out on this dumb blonde kid and Maurice bleeding from the ears.

"I don't care. I'm from America. Not british land. I do what I want, which is a privilege that, fortunately, you won't have." Jeff Probst smiled, "Now, get to work so we can film your laughable attempts at architecture."

In accordance to the almighty television god's will, I buzzed around the kids for the rest of the damned day, watching them build 'laughable architecture'. Whatever. I didn't care at all anyway.

First was the least destructive and strange of the retards, that Ralph kid. The dumb blonde, yeah that one. I followed him around for a while. He kept mumbling to himself, and that fat lame boy was following him too, which was weird. Then they did...uh...rituals?

Ralph set a smallish clam shell in the sand and stood back a few paces. Piggy did the same. I was already farther along behind them at this point, so I just zoomed in on their little shenanigan-fest.

The blonde fell to his knees in the sand while his lardy buddy chanted gibberish.

"SHELTER! BOOM-SHAKA-LAKA!" Ralph screamed, then he threw some sand. And that pretty much was that. After a while of realizing that this was completely pointless and wasn't working-whatever the hell it was in the first place that was supposed to even be happening-Ralph just up and left. He came back a half an hour later with a bunch of huge branches and started getting some real work done while the fat one watched, still in his seashell-filled stupor. I decided that this was probably a good place to leave and go find someone else more logical to torment. So I did.

Oh, look. Simon was awake again. I walked over to his five-foot radius circle-in-the-sand in the center of the beach and stood over his progress. the spherical stick-drawing was really all he'd gotten accomplished. Humming a little tune, he picked up a small piece of driftwood and propped it upright against a rock. Simon looked up and smiled at me.

"Hello, there, resident filmographer!" He greeted cordially.

I lowered my camera off my shoulder and frowned. "That's not a word."

"Pipip Cheerios!"

"Now you're just stereotyping." I scowled. "What kind of bull-crap humor shtick is this anyway?"

"That is one of the more complicated questions of life, isn't it?" He mumbled. Then he passed out again and I left him with his face full of sand and his head full of hot air. Since Maurice was literally right outside of his poorly-drawn circle, I just stepped outside of the radius and turned in his direction.

I didn't even bother talking to this one. He was too busy making sand-angels. At least he looked utterly happy and fulfilled with his life, which is something I had come to put into question lately.

"Jack Merridew." I called instead, remembering his name from the endless orders in the death-match that had occurred when we first arrived, "You there, with the red-head! Nobody's getting me any good material! Please tell me you're doing something other than being a total buffoon."

"Yeah, sure." He waved off from his little cubby in the rock-niche below Jeff's hubris kingdom. "Come on over here."

"Okay. This better be good."

I stepped over countless meandering little children shoving their mouths with sand and crabs and crap and joined the leader of chaos on the rocks. He gestured to a little pile of boulders extravagantly and wiggled his eyebrows. Geez. Everything about this boy made me uncomfortable in every way possible.

"This is my love shack." He said quite simply, as if it were not even debatable, "With this I will get all the ladies."

"It's just a pile of rocks." I narrowed my eyes, putting down my camera again.

"No, look." He scowled indignantly and pulled back a cover of tangled-up seaweed, revealing the inside of his hastily-made rock fort. It was in fact quite nice inside, I had to admit. I mean, for a twelve year old. It was certainly no A-frame or lean-to. But it would suffice. If it didn't cave in and kill him in his sleep, for which I would be sufficiently grateful. Unfortunately, spoiler alert, this never happened. No matter how many times I sabotaged the structure in the midnight hours. Nobody. Was ever. Killed.

"Nice." I commented drily. "Good luck finding ladies, though. In case you haven't noticed, there's no girls on this island."

"There's her." He pointed at blondie, who had actually pulled off a real shelter, like something they'd teach you in survival classes. Color me impressed. "And there's her." He pointed somewhere behind me and, before I could react and turn to face whoever the designated lady was, there came a harsh outcry.

"EFF YOU, JACK MERRIDEW!" It yelled, "I AM NOT A GIRL! I AM A SELF-RESPECTING, UPRIGHT AND STRAIGHT MAN. JUST YOU WATCH. NOBODY MAKES ME THEIR BITCH. ONLY I MAKE ME MY BITCH, BITCH."

"Roger, don't be like that!" Jack crooned.

"Shut up. You suck, probably literally. All of you suck. Leave me alone." The voice grumbled, "Just...leave me alone."

"Aww." Jack moped. I left him alone to get a better look at the Roger kid. It wasn't a girl, surprise surprise. Wow. Didn't see that coming. He was actually that dark-haired kid from earlier who started the fighting in the beginning. I walked over and started rolling the camera again. This should be good.

"Hey. you. Roger."

"Bitch."

"Yeah, sure, how old are you?"

"Like...thirteen. I can handle myself. I don't need your help." He growled.

"That sounds like denial." I admitted aloud.

"It's not." He shot back, "There's denial and there's intelligence. Learn the difference."

"So, um." I started, zooming out so that anybody with a brain could see that this kid was not doing anything. He was just kind of...sulking? No, wrong word. More brooding. He was brooding in the sand, being cooked by the sun. "You gonna build a shelter."

"Nah. I got the stars." He shrugged apathetically, "Plus, what the FUCK is gonna eat me on the beach?! You think like...a fucking...shark? A shark is just gonna stroll up on the beach and mess with shit. Yeah, right. My worries are more concentrated on who's gonna run the joint. Like, enough of this. Everyone already knows that this is a hoax. They brainwashed everyone else or something. That's why they don't know."

"Don't know..." I risked grabbing the bait, "What?"

"They don't know that we've been here before." Roger whispered, hissing. I dropped my camera and just gawked at him. Okay, this kid was crazy. I'd had my hopes up that this would be a normal encounter. But no. This kid was batshit crazy. "Half of us are already dead." He turned half-way and eyed Simon and the tubby kid menacingly. "I'm gonna kill them in their sleep. That's why you're having the shelter-fest. To guard you all from ME. Sharks won't fucking eat you. I'll fucking eat them, and then I'll eat you."

"That's a lot of F-bombs in one sentence, kid." I sneered, "Should I call your parents."

"I ATE THEM."

"No. Did not."

"I'm not about to engage in an argument with a petulant, self-loathing kid like you, you piece of crap." Roger taunted me, sticking his nose up. "I know where this is going. You're just gonna say: Did not. And I'm gonna keep saying: Did too, and it's gonna be like one of those stupid movies where everyone hates those two particular characters."

"Okay. Sure."

"Yeah, but I'm smart, see? So I knew." Roger growled, "Oh, by the way, don't tell anyone I'm talking to you or they'll flip their shit, camera-guy." He grimaced again, this time, deeper. Weird enough, his conversation was actually compelling. Not because he was smart, hell no. But because he was so into his own beliefs that it was laughable. I mean, really? They'd never been to this island in their life. Not once. It probably never existed to the world before we crashed here and made it television history. What was he gonna try to sell me next: that there was a book about it? That it was called some stupid name like: Lord of the flies? Idiot. I listened to the rest of his argument. "See, for the camera and everyone watching, I'll try to reveal as much of my intentions as possible. But to everyone else I'll be a silent menace. And then I'll eat them."

"Enough with the eating." I sighed, "Seriously. It's freaking me out."

"No, it's a valuable asset. And obviously, someone will want me on their team because of it." He explained rather plainly. His eyes latched on to a little sea-snake slithering through the sand, looking for its home after a long voyage out to sea. For attachments sake, my mind called her Marilyn right away. The thing had probably been out for a while looking for food, possible mates, maybe a better place to nest; you know, a place to settle down, maybe have some kids and get a day-job knitting sea-snake sweaters and-

-Oh my God.

And just like that, Marilyn's body was now a severed cylinder of crushed hopes and dreams, dripping with lurid fantasies of what could have been. And also, blood. Because when things die, just an FYI, there tends to be blood. Especially if the death happens to stem from a certain pre-pubescent teenage boy with huge identity issues tearing you in two with his teeth. And ESPECIALLY especially if said young boy with and identity crisis tries to pry out your still-beating heart and shove his pale, nearly-vampire face with it. Oh My God. I wanted to go home. What the HELL was wrong with this damn island. Seriously. That is messed up. Poor Marilyn. Poor me for having to witness that. Poor me for not having caught it on camera so that I could sue people with it.

Wait, where's the camera?

I turned around and scrounged in the dirty sand for it. Some seashells, some dirt, some ocean water, a crab, a piece of metal...but no camera. I don't know why I bothered digging in the first place because the thing was as big as Roger anyway. It's not like it could just run away and...great. Now I had to deal with Maurice. Because, what do you know, I turn back around to ask snake-blood Roger if he'd seen it and I get a good picture of where exactly it is. Maurice had now halted his strange parade of sand-angels and swiped my camera. Stumbling around the sand, laughing like an idiot, he'd shoved it down his pants.

"HEY, COME BACK HERE!" I screamed, "That's gross, come on! I gotta review that footage later, kid! Give it to me!"

"Nope!" He smiled teasingly. He pulled it out of his shorts and tossed it along the beachhead. This is when I was about to give in. The camera was whistling through the air, high-speed, about to crash-land in the Atlantic waves. There goes two-thousand dollars, or something close to that. Yes, this is what I was thinking. Then, like a miracle-or curse, not sure which even now-it gets plucked from the sky and carried away. By something I can't see. Now I've seen it all. A ghost has my camera, which was previously in a kid's pants. I'd watched Marilyn get ripped in half like a sheet of paper and devoured, I'd witnessed some sort of hokey voodoo session with a shell, and I'd talked to a mystic seven-year-old. This was it. THIS WAS FREAKING IT.

"Good catch, Bill!" Maurice cheered, "You can give it to the weird guy now!"

I was going to explode.

"Okay!" Jeff announced without warning, seemingly out of the abyss, "Ralph wins, yay! Time to pick teams and stuff. Let's go, move your puny butts. Hey, you!"

"Me?" I hoarsely said, cracking a crazed smile.

"Yeah. You. Camera guy. I don't know where all those others ran off to." The host shrugged.

I think I had a vague clue. They went the fuck out of here. "Yes?"

"Film. Now."

"Sure thing...boss."

"Cool."

This was going to kill me, wasn't it? This was truly how I'd die. Surely, the fates could have spun something a little more heroic for a guy with my caliber of skills. Like, dies in a fire saving puppies. but no. This was probably how I'd die.

Yeah. If only I were so lucky.

Sorry for the sucky chapter...meep! But it's only an intro...and it people seem OOC, it's for comedy purposes. Lol. Sorry. This fic is janky and hasty, isn't it? O.O

Oh...well. I have an excuse. I am deliriously sick and it's midnight where I live. :P

Thanks for the reviews guys! I would do a review response time, but as I previously mentioned, I probably should be going to bed! Tomorrow's my little bro's 13th birthday too! HAPPY BDAY, LITTLE DUDE. Even though I hope you're not reading this...ehehe. if you are, you shouldn't be. I mean, really... FOUL LANGUAGE IS FOUL...Sadfais. I feel bad writing curses. So, expect to see little to none in the future. meh.

So, I guess. WrITE YOU LATeR.

And goodnight! hehe!