Hour 19
36 Contestants Remaining
The seven contestants remaining in the woodland cabin were all awaiting their friends' return with nervous anticipation. The announcement that had come roughly an hour ago had let them know that they were still alive, but that was all the comfort they were going to get. They all knew well enough that to conserve their already dwindling text messages, the four wouldn't be contacting them until nine – or unless something devastating had happened. As such, they all dreaded the cell phone's shrill beep as much as they wanted to hear from their friends. For the duration at least, it remained silent with a dull display of 'NO NEW MESSAGES.'
Instead, the four – minus Marla Thompson, a.k.a. Girl #18, and Holly Richmond, a.k.a. Girl #15, who were on guard duty, as well as Alexis Brightwell, a.k.a. Girl #5, who was still attempting to dissemble the collars they had retrieved from the three corpses – simply sat around the coffee table in the living room as they enjoyed a thoroughly drab meal of MREs and bottled water.
"Poker?" Alicia Kerr, a.k.a. Girl #21, said hopefully as she held up a deck of cards. She was met with mostly a chorus of "nah, don't wanna play" and "maybe later."
"Oh, come on, you guys," she said annoyed as she tossed the pack on the couch. "I mean, don't get me wrong, sulking in silence is a great national pastime but let's not get too exerted, shall we?"
"I'm just… not in the mood," Nicholas Dillon, a.k.a. Boy #5, said as he chewed on a piece of MRE that looked and tasted like condensed cardboard. Cheap government bastards, all the money at their disposal and the best food they could provide was this crap? Pitiful, utterly pitiful.
"Me neither, but it's still better than letting your pessimistic thoughts turn this whole place into a sob fest," Alicia said sassily as she balled up the remains of an MRE packet and hurled it in the direction of a trash can. It bounced off the rim and rolled away. With an exasperated sigh, Alicia went over and retrieved it, hurling the balled up plastic spitefully into the trash.
"I'm so tired of waiting," Frank Greer, a.k.a. Boy #16, complained as he sat up. "I mean, you're saying we're all in this together, but so far all we've done is sit around and talk. I know those guys are out there and Alexis is working on the collars, but surely there's gotta be something we can do around here?"
"Yeah, I'm real sick of this waiting as well," Nick added in agreement.
"Guys, you know that until we've got something to start with, there's nothing we can do," Jolene Spies, a.k.a. Girl #16, said in reply as she began to feel the brunt of the group's burden fall on her shoulders. As de facto leader of the seven remaining here, she had been on the receiving end of whatever unpleasant happening that was latest to plague one of their minds. She knew that since she had called together these people in the first place, she was more than likely responsible of managing them and keeping them content, but even she didn't know everything. She didn't know what would happen next, she didn't know if the four out there were safe, she didn't know if this goddamn rebellion has the slightest chance in hell of working (you know that one actually, but not something you can tell everybody, is it?). All she could do was keep them from evolving past the current state of unrest.
"Great, I knew it," Nick said sullenly. "What's the point of calling us here in the first place, if all you want us to do is sit around? Cannon fodder?"
"Well, we need people to stand guard and there's strength in numbers, and-" Jolene started to protest, cut off as Alicia came back to her seat.
"And there's the insurance that gathering a large crowd provides, right?" Alicia said matter-of-factly.
"What?" Nick said.
"You know, if there's a chance of succeeding then you can bet the government or whatever agency is behind the game will shut us down in a second," Alicia went on as if it was the most natural conclusion in the world. "Think about it, if it's just her and Micah then if they do find a loophole, there's every chance that they'll just blow up collars number B6 and G16 to stop them from escaping. If she gets enough people together, they'll think twice before killing one quarter of the contestant pool at once. At least, they'll let us go a bit further than otherwise, isn't that right?"
Jolene had no response, staring at the girl with her mouth agape. It wasn't untrue… that was the thing. But letting that on would have betrayed her confidence (not that there's much of that remaining, thanks a lot) and Jolene simply couldn't let that happen. Not before they accomplished what they hoped to do…
"That's not true," she finally lied, her mouth dry from not just the dehydrated MREs.
"It is," Alicia said simply as a look of realization dawned on Nick's face.
"Dude, that's cold. We're just bodies to you?" he asked incredulously.
"No, of course not!" Jolene said vehemently even as she failed to find the words to object. She looked to Nick, Alicia, and Frank with pleading eyes, though for the most part they either averted her gaze or simply stared back at her defiantly.
"Come on, let's not fool ourselves," Alicia said as she munched on another chunk of MRE. "You needed enough people around to keep yourself safe, isn't that right? Why else would you let people who tagged along, like me and Nicole and Holly stick around? You didn't even trust us enough to text us in the first place. Hell, I bet you barely even know half the people here, people who are out of your comfort zone-"
"That's enough," Frank said commandingly as he stared at the black girl in a way that put holes through her. For the most part he had simply sat by in silence, but now that he was in this, he wasn't about to let the group fall apart mere hours after it had formed. He might have been one of Jolene's closest friends, though he still didn't know much of their plan beyond what they had let on. Nevertheless, if this was seriously accomplishable, they had to smooth out all the bad feelings.
"It doesn't matter why she asked us here in the first place, the important thing is we're here, we're in this together, and we're going to do this," he went on. "If you don't trust any one of us, then you're welcome to exit stage left. We can't afford to have anybody who doesn't trust us in here, as much as we can't have people we can't trust. If you want to remain part of us then we need to know you're with us, not just nominally but one hundred percent."
Halfway raising the MRE to her mouth before she froze, Alicia slowly lowered it as she considered what the boy had said. Truth was, she never really bought into the whole escape plan if only because of how… ideal it sounded. Things were bound to go wrong, and odds were that not a single one of them would make it out of here. The only reason she had decided to stick around was because of Elijah really. Still, she'd hate to be forced to head out there – who knew if they'd even let her keep a weapon? – without seeing Elijah again. And at the heart of it, Alicia was not a traitor. If she said she was with them, she would stay with them to the best of her ability (or at least until the shit hit the fan).
"I'm sorry," she mumbled with the grace to look the slightest bit guilty.
"It's okay, I'm sorry too," Jolene said heavily. "Truth is, I gotta admit that there's a part of my reasoning that says that. I do want people around because it makes this easier to accomplish. But as Frank said, we're all in this together now, and I sincerely want to save as many people as possible."
"FUCKING FUCK!"
The outburst came piercingly from inside the bedroom. Jolene, Frank, Alicia, and Nick all turned at once to the doorway, more frightful than any of them would care to admit. Alexis was working on the collars inside, but they knew fully that these weren't just any electronic contraption they were dealing with. One wrong move while handling the metal circlet could blast all her fingers clean off. There wasn't any sound of explosion or electronic beeps that they could hear, but…
Alexis emerged from the doorway with a look that clearly suggested she was totally pissed off. In one hand she held a half dissembled metal collar, in the other an ice pick with a slightly blunted tip.
"I can't do this, okay?" she shot out as the others looked questioningly to her.
"What's wrong?" Nick asked alarmingly as Holly and Marla looked in to see what the commotion was.
"I've tried my best, but this ain't happening, I'm sorry," Alexis said quickly as she gestured with the tools in her hands. "This is too difficult, no, it's downright impossible. Cars I can work with, motorcycles and wagons I can fix, but this, this is no engine. This thing's a goddamn bomb, and there's no way I can break it open and defuse it. I've done the best I can. I removed one of the panels on the side without tripping the detonator, but I'm sorry that this is as far as it's gonna get. Maybe your friend can crack this like a game console, but I'm not gonna be able to do it, I'm sorry."
With a slight remorseful look, she added, "I'm sorry I can't figure it out, but there's nothing further I can work on."
Silence reigned the room until Frank broke it. Speaking in the calming tone he often adopted when dealing with a friend's existential crisis or talking somebody out of a suicide attempt, he said, "You've cracked open one side of it, that's better than any of us can do. Hell, that's better than anybody in the previous seasons could do, and probably more than the game officials figured we could make do with a handful of primitive tools. I'm still here because I have trust in you and Micah, if you put your heads together I'm sure you can crack that collar."
"Yeah, it's no big deal if you feel the pressure," Alicia shot in. "I mean, it's fucking Battle Royale, the pressure's going to get us all some way or another."
"Keep working on it, okay? We have confidence in you," Frank said simply.
"I'm going to fuck this up if I try any further, I just know this," Alexis said maddeningly.
"No, you're not," Jolene said confidently. "I know we didn't intend to ask for your help at first, but you're here now and you're here for a reason. Some old guy with a white beard up there in the sky wants us to blow this thing wide apart, and it knows that we're going to need your help. So pull yourself together, take a breather and maybe a dinner break, then get your ass back in there and get us out of this game."
Wiping the back of her palm against her eyes (no tears though, no tears), Alexis said quietly, "I can try."
"You do that," Frank said with a bit of pride in his voice. "You do that and get us out of here."
The examination room of the medical center was a fairly spacious room lined with various machinery, supply closets, and counters that reached up to their chests. In the middle of the room was an examination chair that could be tilted back to allow its user to recline, the kind you'd see at a dentist's. At the moment, Jessica Fondacaro, a.k.a. Girl #8, was lounged in the examination chair in considerable discomfort as Shaina Mueller, a.k.a. Girl #17, as the only other girl in the building, begrudgingly examined her with the aid of a heavy and very dusty medical handbook.
"So what sort of trauma's happened to you?" Shaina asked in a none too pleasant tone.
"What?" Jessica replied confusedly.
"It doesn't look like it's appendicitis or menstrual cramps, and you guys said you had a few run ins earlier, so I'm assuming you must have gotten hurt or something," Shaina replied as she flipped idly through the text. "Of course there's every possibility that this is simply some medical condition we can't explain, in which case there's nothing we can do. But for the sake of it, give us something to work with here."
"Well," Jessica said hesitantly as she briefly considered their previous encounter, "we came across Kurt."
"Vogel?"
"How many other Kurts do you know are on this island? Anyway, we got into a scuffle, he kicked me in the gut a couple of times, it hurt like hell but I didn't figure anything was wrong besides, y'know, the whole thing about it hurting like a son of a gun. You don't think he ruptured something, do you?"
"Honestly, I don't know," Shaina said, shaking her head. "Let's face it, none of us are qualified surgeons here."
"Fuck, that's just… fucking great," Jessica moaned as she lolled her head back.
As a tear slid down her cheek, she said with some despair, "So I'm gonna die then, I guess."
"Considering the circumstances, I'd say there's a pretty huge chance of that," Shaina said brusquely in reply. "'bout ninety-eight percent odds if my math is right."
Before either of the girls could make another sound, they could clearly hear the front door slam open with great urgency. This was followed by sounds of people making their way into the building. Footsteps and shouts echoed from the lobby as Shaina could clearly hear Justin Everett, a.k.a. Boy #23, shout unintelligibly.
"Oh shit, sounds like trouble. Stay here," Shaina said a bit fearfully as she pulled out the pistol.
Leaving the despondent Jessica alone, she ran out the hallway and headed towards the lobby. There were people out there. She didn't know what they wanted, but it could hardly be any good. Either they were people like Jessica, who were hurt and came to the medical center in search of medical aid, or… She hoped it wasn't the alternative. There were all sorts of fucked up people out there. Many of them were dicks and bitches who wouldn't hesitate before blowing a round through somebody's head. And then there was Elijah's posse… Justin might have been a part of the student council, but Shaina knew well enough to steer clear of Elijah's people.
Shaina came through the double doors with the SIG-Sauer leading the way, instinctively leveling the gun at the two figures standing in front of the open doors.
"Jesus Christ, don't shoot me!" Chet Donovan, a.k.a. Boy #22, said as he held his sledgehammer in a defensive stance.
The other guy was somebody she didn't really recognize. Sure, she might have seen him now and then around the school, and probably a few times outside of, but she couldn't place him. Scrawny build, pale skin, black knit cap and headphones. The guy looked incredibly jittery as he leaned against the wall, brandishing a plastic toy gun. His pack was dumped at his feet, bulging to its limit with all sorts of… metal implements? It looked plenty odd, but Shaina had more important things on her mind.
"Who's this cracker?" she said insultingly as she pointed to him with the pistol.
"Hey, watch it," he said nervously as he aimed the toy pistol at her. "The name's Jeremy. You're Shaina Mueller, right? I've seen you around."
"The one and only," she said emphatically. "Whatcha doin' here? Who the fuck let you in?"
"I'm not dealing with this one," Chet muttered under his breath as he walked in the direction of the examination room.
"Hey, it's okay, Justin let me in," said Jeremy Paisley, a.k.a. Boy #15, as he gestured wildly. "You see, I was with someone who's really badly hurt and we needed help…"
"What? The hell do you think we look like, fucking CEDA?" Shaina practically shrieked. "We're not some kind of charity service that'll take just anybody in need, fuck, you want one of those people, you go look for the Doctors Without fucking Borders!"
Raising her gun threateningly, she practically towered over the boy despite her somewhat stunted height, and talked spitefully in his face, "I don't give a shit if it's your grandma and she's got some motherfucking strain of flesh-eating bacteria, or if she's got syphilis or rabies or what the fuck ever. I don't care if it's your little sister with an arm and both legs hacked off. You people need to leave, now."
Ever the pacifist, Jeremy still tried to talk calmingly to the girl. "Look, it's all fine you see, we don't mean no harm."
"If I can still see your pasty asses here in five seconds, I do," Shaina snarled as she pointed the gun at her feet and fired a warning shot. The bullet sailed harmlessly (though loudly) into the wooden floor, ripping up the polished oak and making her point perfectly clear. Jeremy turned ashen as he backed away from the enraged girl.
"Jesus Christ, what are you, fucking nuts?" he squealed.
Hearing the loud sound echo from within its halls, Chet emerged from the hallway doors, looking as though he was priming himself up for some unexpected occurrence. Never one to go down without a fight, Chet wielded his sledgehammer overhead and prepared to bring it down with all the might he had, but the caution was unnecessary; Shaina had already sheathed the pistol snugly within its holster. Instead, she turned to the jock and the cheerleader.
"You," she said disgustedly, "and your girlfriend, the two of you are going to be the death of me. I just know this."
With an impudent whip of her black tresses, Shaina stormed past the thoroughly bewildered Chet and stomped off into the director's office.
"What's up with Little Miss Oprah?" Chet mused.
"Dunno, she looks like she swallowed a bug with her cornflakes… or something," Jeremy muttered. "You figure I can lay low around here for a bit?"
"I don't know," Chet replied, "it's not my decision to make..."
Turning the attention to the bagful of antique weaponry at Jeremy's feet, he piped up, "…but I don't think that's gonna be a problem. We'll put a word in, for all that's gonna help. Just one tiny, insignificant detail though…"
"This is not good," Micah Webster, a.k.a. Boy #6, moaned in palpable despair as he regarded the mess of metal and circuitry that surrounded him. Once an Internet café that offered salvation for legions of Internet addicts in their quest to be the champion digital slayer of the week – as well as lesser folks who preferred to get their groove on in the dark confines of the café, online or otherwise – it was totally trashed, for lack of a better word. Somebody had methodically and painstakingly gone through the entire place, wrecking every single bit of technology more advanced than an espresso machine, to the point that not one piece of hardware was salvageable.
"I mean, this is bad, this is really bad," he babbled on as he walked around the carpet of shattered hard drives, data crunching beneath his shoes.
"We're aware of that," Hank Norton, a.k.a. Boy #17, said annoyed as he sifted through the wreckage, finding nothing that looked remotely repairable (though admittedly to his layman eyes). "You sure there's nothing of use in here? Maybe a hard drive or a keyboard, anything that escaped intact that we can scavenge?"
"I'm normally good at fixing stuff, but this is simply impossible. It's like trying to, I don't know, failing to find a glass vase in a desert and trying to make one regardless," Micah said angrily.
"That's bad," the doe-eyed Nicole Reiniger, a.k.a. Girl #14, said as she held up a frayed length of fiber cable, "but I do know there's one solution."
"What?" Hank asked.
"Duct tape, get enough of that stuff and I swear it fixes anything," Nicole replied smartly. "You can build anything as long as you've got duct tape. When I was five, my dad made me a tree house out of nothing but duct tape and a broken mop."
"Not the case here, I'm afraid," Micah replied frustrated as he tossed something that looked like the internal organs of a cyborg back into the wreckage.
"You think the government did this?" Hank asked nonchalantly as he tipped over a trash can, predictably finding nothing but trash. Food wrappers, aluminum cans, socks, condoms, and a broth of concentrated soda that had seeped out of all the discarded cans.
"Nah, can't be," Nicole muttered. "I don't think they would do something like this, at least. They renovated the whole place in preparation for the game, right? There'd be no sense of putting up a computer lab like this place if they're just going to tear it down. It makes sense if they install, like, a trillion keyboard loggers and filters and keep the computers off the networks, but… this makes no sense. They built it up and tore it down. No, it doesn't ring true to me. And remember the other places we checked? Nothing destroyed, they just hauled away the computers."
"Somebody else, maybe? Some bastard thought it would be funny to take it all out on the computers, make it hell for anybody who wanted to check their email," Hank grunted. "God damn, if I ever find the son of a bitch who did this, I'd like to show him a little…"
"Hank, cool it," Micah said as he began to get increasingly pissed. "This isn't getting us anywhere. We need to go, keep moving before it's too late. Where's the next spot on Jolene's map?"
"Far," Nicole replied simply as she pulled out the map and identified the nearest location.
"Great, that's real helpful," Hank said sarcastically.
"Actually, there's supposedly a security center near the main streets… but I suppose with the fire raging down there, any computer there's gotta be crispier than anything we'll find in here," Nicole said.
"Let's not head there," Micah said. "I don't know about you guys but I like my skin uncooked.
"Me either," Nicole said daintily.
"That makes three of us, but I have a feeling the jackass who did this is going to find his ass torched drier than the cafeteria's meatloaf if I get my hands on him," Hank grunted as he stared at a video camera capturing their motions from the corner of the room. "Nice of them to leave the cameras intact though. The show must go on, huh? God forbid a little vandalism interrupt the broadcast of non-stop slaughter."
"Let's smash it," Nicole suggested. "Show 'em what we think of this shit."
"Let's not, I like my neck the way it is," Hank said as he moved to shield the camera's vision. "But I will also state that for the record, neither myself nor my neck likes the camera very much. It's unflattering."
Nicole laughed, more out of politeness than anything else. The insincerity showed in her voice, but Hank didn't mind for once. It was nice to hear another person laugh, even if they were a fake plastic bitch who probably had a higher content of hair dye than brain cells in her skull. You're both on the same side now though, the past's behind you. Come on now, Hankie, not now, not here, please.
"So there's really nothing of use here?" Nicole asked as she brushed a lock of red hair from her face.
"Nope," Micah replied hollowly.
"Then there's no point in dwelling here. Let's go, Elijah's probably getting real anxious," Nicole said as she picked up her sickle.
"I guess," Hank said with a sigh. "Fuck, I'm so not looking forward to telling Mister E about this. I think at around the third, maybe fourth place we stopped at, he started losing it. I bet if you tell him all we found down here is jack shit, he's gonna do that weird bug-eyed stare."
Nicole laughed again, this time with a bit of genuine humor.
The three walked up the stairs that had led down to the subterranean Internet café, emerging from the gated doors as cool evening air enveloped what little warmth they had gathered from inside the building. Greeting them at the top of the stairs was Elijah Ricks, a.k.a. Boy #21, looking incredibly anticipatory as he balanced his aluminum baseball bat on his shoulder. Seeing that they were not carrying anything that they hadn't brought down, his expression slipped all the way to crestfallen.
"No luck, I assume?" he asked as he tried to conceal the note of disappointment.
"None, sorry, somebody smashed up everything and even Micah said there's nothing we can use down there, save for a coffeemaker which we elected not to take," Nicole replied as she looked uncomfortable.
Leaning over to Hank, she whispered, "You're right. It's unsettling."
"Told ya. I think it's the forehead that's accentuating them," Hank snickered under his breath.
"Freaky," she said with a smile.
Oblivious to their exchange, Elijah slammed the end of his baseball bat on the ground in anger. "Brilliant, isn't this just brilliant. Well, we're off to a great start, there's our chance at freedom right down there lying in pieces, I guess. So R.I.P., my buddies, guess this is it, huh?"
"There's still other places," Micah said tiredly.
"Well, gee, just want you to know that we're all real hopeful that a squadron of merciless soldiers will overlook a computer in a freaking game arcade," Elijah said acidly.
"Hey, I'm sorry this doesn't work out, but we all know what we're heading into when you first lent a hand, you know this is gonna be difficult and guess what, here it is, it's not all sunflowers and perfume! There's no walkthrough, no gamers' guide to tell us where to go!"
Taken aback (and with eyes wider than ever), Elijah promptly apologized. "I didn't mean to lose my temper. I know we're all doing the best we can, and things are out of our control, but… it just plain freaking sucks."
"If we had any liquor, I'd drink to that," Hank said with a laugh.
None of them had liquor, but they did have a surprise waiting for them. As the group wearily gathered their belongings and prepared to set off for the game arcade that Jolene had marked on their map (roughly half an hour away by Micah's estimation), they were rudely jolted back to full awareness by the sharp crack of a gunshot. Elijah, Hank, and Micah dropped instinctively to the ground. Nicole, slower to react, spun around slightly as she cried out and slammed into the ground, fortunately cushioned by Micah's body.
"You alright?" Micah asked frantically as he discarded the rusty shovel and instead ripped the Smith & Wesson from his belt.
"I'm fine, I'm fine," Nicole muttered as she examined her shoulder. The shot had grazed her arm, tearing flesh and drawing a spray of blood. While it did hurt like a son of a bitch, it was not any more severe than a mere flesh wound.
Gritting her teeth, she bore the pain as she followed the three guys dodging behind the sign of the Internet café. Boasting in enormous font the store's trademark 'COFFEE DWELLERS,' the fluorescent lit sign reached up to waist level and was scarcely wide enough to offer four people extremely uncomfortable comfort. It probably would not have been able to impede a high velocity bullet, but with the four concealed from the open, they enjoyed some temporary strand of safety. Whoever the shooter was, they remained cautious and conservative, not firing another shot.
"Shoot to kill, shoot to kill," Hank said urgently to himself as he brandished the Beretta, while Elijah struggled to even dislodge the long shotgun from his back.
"Where?" Micah yelped, not daring to chance a peek. "I can't see anybody!"
"Me neither, shoot blind!" Hank replied, snaking his hand out and taking several wild shots without benefit of aim. He managed to destroy the windshield of a parked car as well as the doorknob of a fortune teller's abode, but seemingly nothing more.
"No, don't!" Nicole hissed as she pressed a hand on the boy's shoulder. "We gotta conserve the bullets."
"Well, I don't see you doing anything to save our skins," Hank said angrily as he clumsily reloaded. Nevertheless, he ceased fire and instead held the pistol close.
"Got it!" Elijah finally yelled as he twisted the shotgun into a position capable of firing.
"Fat lot of g-" Hank began to say angrily, cut off as new shots cascaded around them, striking holes in the concrete sidewalk. Nicole shrieked a little, instinctively bringing her legs closer around Hank's waist. The four cowered in differing states of terror as they waited for the gunfire to cease, and though for a while it seemed their attacker had a never-ending supply of bullets and an arm that reloaded at light speed, the barrage finally came to a rest after seconds.
Taking a slight risk, Nicole shot a hand beyond the frontier of minimal protection the sign offered, then immediately snatched it back as no shot echoed towards them. Their attacker must have been occupied, either reloading or otherwise, which meant-
"Now!" Elijah yelled as he and Hank shot up from their hiding place, while Micah leaned to the side and caught a broad view of the street. The road was lined with novelty stores with themes ranging from a showroom that encased a sleek and bodacious DeLorean, to an insanely sinister emporium that displayed seven thousand kinds of scented tissues. All sorts of other obstacles were arbitrarily placed in the way – parked cars, al fresco seating, trash cans, even the odd mailbox, as well as a stunned blonde girl caught mid-act of reloading as her fight or flight reflex shorted out.
They recognized Daphne Reagan, a.k.a. Girl #25, but more importantly, they recognized the Browning High Power in her hands as the gun that had been steadily fired at them in the past minutes. Reacting simultaneously, all three pointed their respective guns at the prone girl, while Nicole cautiously slunk back into the confines behind the sign, not having a firearm of her own and not wanting to risk being shot.
By some miracle, all three of them, though normally impulsive, managed to control their trigger fingers instead of turning Daphne into a girl-shaped slab of Swiss cheese.
"Don't move," Elijah said waveringly. "Don't talk, don't run, don't tremble, don't even fucking blink. Anything that may be construed as a threatening action, and I guarantee you we'll have you pumped full of lead casings."
Approaching the girl in a wide arc that led him behind her as the others kept their guns trained on her chest, Hank came up from behind her and mindfully jammed the muzzle of his Beretta up against the back of her head with one hand. With his free hand, he reached to Daphne's tightly clasped fingers and pried the unloaded gun from her hands. The loose bullets in her palm tinkered on the ground.
Recognizing in the back of his mind how eerily similar the situation was compared with his own encounter of Alexis not a day ago, Hank quickly jammed the gun in his belt and shoved Daphne to the ground. She fell daintily, scraping up her hands and elbows as she struggled to keep from completely falling. Considering that she had been looking to take their very lives moments ago, the boys showed her no mercy.
"You can get up now, bitch," Hank said with distaste. "As long as you don't try anything stupid."
With a resentful glare and blood adhering to her tight shirt, Daphne looked up at Micah and said spitefully, though the words were clearly for all three of their benefits, "Typical chauvinist pigs."
"I didn't catch that?" Hank asked sarcastically as he beckoned for Elijah and Micah to come closer.
"I said, you assholes are typical examples of misogynistic pigs, alright?" Daphne screeched. "What, just because I'm a woman, you think I deserve inferior treatment? I can be pushed to the ground and stripped of my properties? Do you think I'm some sort of Would you do the same to one of your own?"
"If they were trying to shoot our faces off," Elijah said darkly as he aimed the shotgun between her breasts, "hell yes. Now shut the fuck up and get to your feet."
"I will not be silenced, and I will not be ordered to obey," Daphne said defiantly.
"Too bad," Elijah said, unamused.
"You're not going to shoot her, are you?" Nicole asked as she finally poked her head up from behind the DWELLERS sign (now missing one of its Ls thanks to a wayward shot).
"No, I was thinking we argue about this and waste another couple hours, let some other vandal blow the computer arcade up, then I shoot her," Elijah said without an ounce of humor.
Not actually having seen the four clearly, Daphne was surprised to see another female on the scene. The emotion disappeared just as quickly as she protested, "Yet another example of your rampant sexism. If she's as much a member of your group, she should hold an equal portion of the decision. You don't get to override her just like that."
"Seriously, shut up," Hank said annoyed, reminding her position with a jab of his Beretta.
"I will not!" she yelled, but made no other arguments.
"Hey, Nicole," Hank yelled to the girl.
"Yeah?"
"Do you want to search her, or should I?" Hank said as he nudged the downed Daphne with one foot.
"I'll do it," Nicole said in reply, quickly going up to the girl.
As she brushed past Hank, she couldn't help but mutter, "Bitch is still a bitch, but she's right. You are a pig."
"What? I'm offended," Hank said, clearly feigning offense as he held a hand to his heart mockingly.
"You heard me right," Nicole said coldly as she ran her hands methodically down Daphne's sides, pulling out her wallet and discarding it. "If you think this whole thing is a chance for you to grope girls, you can fuck right off. I can't speak for Jolene or the others, but I personally can't coast out of here with an arrogant jerk who thinks it's his god-given right to unresistingly fuck me three ways if I bite it."
"Hey, you two, cool it," Micah spoke up, uncomfortable with where the conversation might be heading.
"Uh, news flash, you know I'm gay, right?" Hank said incredulously.
Nicole appeared mildly surprised, but processed the information quickly as she pulled Daphne's pack away. "Well, believe me, if we knew that, the girls would've had a lot more leverage over you."
"Homophobic bullying is as large a pr-" Daphne piped up in complaint, her protests almost immediately silenced as Hank kicked her viciously in the shin.
"You're political, we get it. Now shut the fuck up," Hank said savagely as he turned to Nicole. "You done there yet?"
Quickly checking the insides of Daphne's shoes and finding nothing more lethal than lint, Nicole turned to her companions, saying, "She's clean. Nothing concealed as far as I can tell, just the gun. So what do we do now?"
"We let her go, I suppose," Elijah said. "Not with the gun, obviously."
"Whoa, we just let her go? That bitch is dangerous. She tried to kill us, if we let her go she's bound to kill somebody else with a gun and then she'll come back to bite us in the ass," Hank said agitated.
"You're not suggesting that we kill her?" Micah asked.
"I don't know, but we can't let her walk free," Hank admitted.
"If we keep her gun and let her run out there with no weapon and she ends up dying, it will be on our conscience," Micah said unsettlingly.
"Can we keep her around? I mean, she's already defenseless, and we have enough guns to keep her on a leash. It's better than letting her go and not knowing what she'll be up to, or… the alternative," Nicole said.
"We can't afford to let an outsider in though," Elijah said slowly, "especially not one who's shown she's not above playing the game."
"Please, just let me go," Daphne pleaded. "I don't know what you guys are up to, but I don't want to be a part of it."
"I just don't think we should bring along a bitch with a vendetta to murder us in our sleeps on a wild goose chase for a computer that, for all we know, might not even exist in one piece," Hank said, gesturing with his hands.
"You knew the deal from the start," Micah said as he gritted his teeth. "We're not killing her. It's unethical."
"Uh, you guys looking for a computer?" Daphne said confusedly. "I know where you can find one."
"You do?" Elijah asked harshly.
"Yeah, and I can take you to the general vicinity," Daphne said, "on one condition. You give my gun back, and let me go afterward."
"No way," Hank said instantaneously. "No way, no fucking way."
"You do that and I'll bring you to a computer," Daphne reminded.
"Sounds too good to be true," Micah said. "Why don't you tell us a bit more, and we'll decide whether or not to believe you."
"You know Caleb? He's got a computer and he tossed it. I'm fairly certain I know where it is," she said.
"Caleb's dead, the report said Phoebe killed him," Nicole interjected.
"Yeah, but he lost the computer early on, and I know there's only so many places it can be at," Daphne said as she bit her lower lip. Is this going to work? Can this buy her some time to leverage for her weapon, her life, her freedom? God knows, but this gang doesn't look bad…
"Please, I'll help you guys find what you're looking for, and I'll go on my merry way," she added.
The four considered the downed girl. Some doubted what she had said, taking her words to be a tale spun out of desperation; others were willing to at least verify her claims. None of them knew what was really the right thing to do. There were several options at hand here, and each looked as immoral as the next. As they struggled to maintain some sense of normality in the game, Elijah spoke up.
"Alright," he said, more to the others than to Daphne, "here's what we're gonna do…"
Paul Cavallo, a.k.a. Boy #14, whistled a merry tune as he carried two heavy fuel canisters under his arms. Standard jerry cans with a twenty liter capacity apiece, altogether close to forty liters of aviation fuel. Adding that to the six canisters he had already collected, he had managed to amass over eighty gallons of kerosene. A great deal of that he had managed to find after breaking open the padlock on the gate to an aircraft hangar, while the rest was from various other sources of dubious quality all over the island. All in all, not bad for a day's worth of work.
As what could only be termed as a self-declared anarchist, it wasn't alarming to think that Paul would end up heading down this path. Given his political inclinations (chaotic neutral), it would either be this or a last ditch rebellious suicide. The latter was quickly ruled out, given the fact that all of the people involved in the planning and execution of the Battle Royale were located safely far away from the shores. Instead, he had to make do with the remaining option. Though not an avid supporter of the Battle Royale series, he knew well enough that none had ever succeeded at this daunting task before, even those who were much better equipped than him intellectually and in terms of weapons. True, he was not the brightest of minds. Truer still, he only had a crowbar and the most basic of survival supplies to his current name. But still, Paul knew there was absolutely no way that he was going to fall victim to the game.
With a solid twenty hours' worth of effort, Paul had managed to put together all that he would need to set the plan into motion. If all went well, he would be submerged in the sea and far away from the island in less than an hour. From there, he could swim to the mainland (visible from the coast, thank heavens) and pursue further endeavors from there.
Finally reaching the small but well-provisioned airport on the island, Paul gingerly set down the two jerry cans. His muscles were mightily sore from all the sweat and exertion he had put in. But it would all be worth it.
Lifting the dog tags that dangled from his neck, he thought of the people who would want him to pull this off. As the faintest hint of a smile came across his lips, Paul couldn't help but raise a triumphant fist to the skies.