Hour 32
26 Contestants Remaining
According to the map, it was the brig. Military prison, where the worst of the worst are sent, though by the looks of this two story tall concrete shack it was probably just a holding cell for drunk marines who got a little too shitfaced during shore leave. There wasn't much special about it, really just an ordinary two story concrete building with a couple small windows here and there. However, none of that interested Joel Giovanello, a.k.a. Boy # 23. No, the building was inconsequential. What interested Joel more than anything else was the smoke that was leaking out of the building's small chimney. It was hard to discern in the driving rain, but it was definitely there.
He sat beneath a large tree, getting limited protection from the water that fell from the sky as he smoked a cigarette. They sat far enough from the building (and away from any of the exposed windows) that there was nothing to fear in regards to being spotted, while their scout... Their scout would make sure the coast was clear.
"It's been five minutes," Mike complained, looking at his watch and then to the front door of the Brig off in the distance, "he should be back by now. I told you we should've gone in there guns blazing and just gotten this over with! Not sending in some 'tard to do the work for us!"
Joel just sat by quietly, finishing off his cigarette as he stubbed it out on the ground. Bo and CC kept themselves close to the base of the tree, trying their best to keep warm with their limited clothing.
"You saw the body just like I did," Joel responded, referring to the charred and mutilated corpse they had found floating in the stream.
"You know I did," Mike said, grimacing at the thought, "I blew chunks all over the place."
"And you saw the burned ground over there by the building like I did," Joel responded, getting Mike to nod once more.
"Well," Joel continued, "seeing as how we all heard the same announcement it stands to reason that the corpse we saw belonged to Gervase, and by the burned ground this seems to be the place that he was lit on fire. Now, if we go in there guns blazing, it stands to reason that we might also be set on fire by the SOB's up there too, don't it?"
"Maybe," Big V responded, still a bit unsure, "but Shane?"
"Shane'll do what we say," Joel said with a slight grin, "tell him to eat broken glass and he'll do it until he pukes blood. We tell him to run into fire he'll do it no questions asked. He's good on point here, and if he don't come back, we know to go around the place. But it don't look like that's how it's gonna go."
Joel hardly even moved, but Mike and the others needed to turn their heads to see Shane come bounding on over with a wide smile on his face from the brigs' front doors. He ran on over happily, not even minding that he fell down and slid into the base of the tree that Joel, Mike, Bo and CC had gathered around.
"Hey guys!" Shane practically yelled with his enthusiastic grin, while Mike and Joel could only angrily shush him as he sat.
"Be quiet or else they'll hurt us," Joel said calmly, "you don't want them to hurt us, right?"
"No, no, no," Shane replied, "I don't want them hurtin none of us."
"Good, and none of us want to be hurt," Joel responded slowly in an effort to make Shane understand, "Now, while you were inside, did you get a good look around?"
"Yeah, I did!" Shane responded enthusiastically.
"What did you see?" Joel asked.
Taking a moment to go into his thoughts, Shane closed his eyes tightly and started to speak.
"I just got into a small room through that door with a couple chairs on the floor and a desk and things, but I couldn't get to the other side of the room because there were bars in the middle of the room like at the zoo."
"Was there anything behind the bars?" Mike quickly interjected, getting Joel to wave his hand dismissively.
"I could see cages on the right, and stairs on the left! But all the stairs were broken. I could hear the people up the stairs though, I know I could hear them!"
"The people were up the broken stairs?" Joel asked with a smile.
"Yes, people were upstairs, I know that!" Shane said with a proud smile.
"Thanks Shane, you were a big help, now I'm going to talk to the others now, all right? Can you sit off to the side for just a second?"
"Sure thing Joel!" Shane responded, stepping away from the tree and sitting down more under its cover. As he did that, Joel pulled Bo and Big V off to another side of the tree, even out of CC's earshot. While normally she'd try to get in with the group, she knew enough just to avoid what was going on here.
"Whoever's up there's smart," Joel said, "locked the gate in there and tore out the staircase leading upstairs, keep themselves locked up real nice."
"They're dug in like a bloody tick," Bo responded, wiping his chin and looking up to the building with not a lot of hope. He wanted to avoid the real danger if he could at all, but following Joel didn't make that any more pleasant a proposition.
"Well, not too good," Joel said, "gates in there got doors and I think we can break that down easy, just have to keep it quiet if we can."
"Breaking down a metal gate isn't exactly quiet man," Mike said, his eyes a bit worried, "they're gonna hear us."
"Which is why we get Shane to do it," Joel responded with a slight smile, "they firebomb us, they get him, not us. But, if they don't see us, we make it to the stairs they tore up, lift Shane up there, get him to lift us up so we can divide and conquer. How's that sound?"
A pause went between the three men as they stood looking off at the remains of the brig.
"That sounds pretty fucked to me," Bo said.
"Me too," Mike responded, "but I don't have anything better to do. Let's go."
As Joel holstered up his shotgun, Bo and Mike pulled out their respective pistols. Joel waved for Shane and CC to join them, and like that the five, soon to be four, members of the wrestling party took on the task of extracting Jackson and Eliza from their hideaway.
"Phoebe Cates was in Fast Times at Ridgemont High with Judge Reinhold, who was in Beverly Hills Cop with Paul Reiser, who was in Aliens with Bill Paxton, who was in Apollo 13 with none other than Kevin Bacon. I rule!" Jackson Brent, a.k.a. Boy # 7, said, performing the time tested "raising the roof" maneuver to salute his victory.
"Like that was ever in doubt?" Eliza Mann, a.k.a. Girl # 19, asked with her warmest of smirks.
"What was in doubt? That I rule or that Kevin Bacon was in Apollo 13?"
"Well, since it's beyond a doubt that you rule," Eliza continued, "I'd have to say that it's in doubt that Kevin Bacon has found himself a film career after the late 80's to early 90's."
"You're damn right," Jackson responded, taking another puff off his joint.
"How much more of that do you have?" Eliza asked, more than a bit concerned at the amount of marijuana her boyfriend had been smoking.
"Enough to last out the rest of this thing cruising high as a kite," Jackson said smoothly, running a hand through the greasy hair that stuck out from under his knit cap, "Why, you want some?"
"No," Eliza said as she forced a smile, "I'm fine, I'm getting a pretty good contact high as it is around here."
She shivered slightly, putting more wood into the oven and cozying up near the flame with a blanket around her shoulders.
"It's just..." she trailed off. She wanted to say it, it had made her nervous since the game had started. Yes, she liked to get stoned every so often, but Jackson had been consistently ripped for almost the entire game thus far, and it definitely was not healthy.
"Just what?" Jackson said, trying to open his eyes completely and failing. He knew they were bloodshot, and right now he wasn't in the mood to have to see everything the world had to offer.
"Are you sure you're ok with being stoned now? I mean, we're going to die here," the words streamed from her mouth.
"That's all the more reason to get ripped," Jackson said smiling a wide and toothy smile, "I don't want to see what's coming up on me, I just want it all to happen like it happens."
"But don't you want a chance to survive?" she pleaded, "I mean, maybe we can go out there and find someone who is trying to escape?"
"Who?" Jackson asked, getting a bit angry, "Who can get us out of here besides in a fucking body bag?"
"Anna probably," Eliza said with a shrug, "she's good at things like this, and I know her from all the SDS meetings. She's really smart."
"SDS, shit don't mean nothing out here," Jackson responded, putting his joint down.
"It means something to me!" Eliza said as she raised her voice, "I joined them because I wanted to be a part of something, to be something bigger than I am, to get involved! What'd you ever do?"
"Nothing! Nada, nil, nothing, is that what you wanted to hear? Is that what you wanted to hear Eliza?" Jackson practically yelled, standing up from his cot. Getting defensive, Eliza backed off of her chair and onto a cot of her own.
A thundercrack exploded outside, conveniently covering up the noise as the wrestlers wrenched the metal gate from the floor below them.
"I didn't say that," Eliza responded.
"I'm not smart, but I'm not dumb either. I could stop the dope at anytime, but I don't because it's my decision. Have you ever considered that sometimes my decision might be the right one? If it was up to me, we wouldn't even be here!" Jackson said with more anger as he raised his voice, "It's not my fault that we're here!"
"And it is mine?" Eliza said, hurt.
"Yeah, if it was up to me we would've taken those tickets to Disneyland with those kids from San Delgado, and we'd have spent the night riding over-packed rides, getting high and finding dark corners to make out. Right about now we'd be back home, having some cheap pancakes at Hi-Life, and laughing about what a good time we had. Instead, you wanted to go out and see your friends for one last time, so, yeah, I'd say some of this is your fault."
Eliza sighed and sat down on the cot, burying her face in her hands as she tried not to cry. She knew she loved him, but sometimes his inability to face reality frustrated her. There were just times that he didn't see things for what they were, totally random, or see things in true perspective. When he was ripped he was irrational and paranoid, and putting him in a life or death situation didn't make it any better. She'd seen him worse off before though. Like many a major event among the alumni of Braiwood High School, it seemed to cosmically link itself to that fateful prom night...
She had these stupid fairy tale imaginings of how everything would be absolutely perfect that night. It'd be fun and non-traditional, like the dress she had partly made from duct tape to get that scholarship from the duct tape company, but a night to remember nevertheless. It'd be magical, maybe even a fairy tale of sorts if she really got lucky.
Instead, after all those dance fiascos she had to sit for over an hour in their hotel room, caring for him as he came down off a hash and shroom high, pants around his ankles, shoes on his hands, clapping, waddling, and chuckling maniacally as he sang "I clap for the shoe hands... peek-a-boo!" She had humored him until the novelty finally wore off, and he passed out on the bed without so much as a kiss goodnight.
He woke up several hours later shrieking about the things crawling under his skin, causing him to go so far as to use a razor blade to try and cut them out from his skin. Eliza had called the paramedics, and it was almost ruled a suicide... but Jackson was all right. He'd sworn off the hallucinogens and other hard shit since, just sticking to the good old Mary J.
Eliza let a tear roll down her cheek, watching as her boyfriend paced around angrily. As much as it may have been his trademark, sometimes it was too much. Sometimes it became who he was more than the wonderfully sweet person he usually could be. Sometimes it made Eliza doubt the very foundation of why she was with this man...
Looking up as he paced back into the room, she wondered for just a brief moment if she was really better off staying here after all. Maybe, maybe not. But, she still loved him.
"I didn't know..." Eliza finally muttered.
"What?" Jackson asked.
"I didn't know!" she shrieked, "How could I have known? This was done at random!"
"No, no, no," Jackson said as he walked more around the room, "things like this are never random, it can't be, we were chosen for a reason, no, no, no, this doesn't make any sense. This is a government things, and nothing no matter how they want us to think in this whole government is at random. There is a system, there has to be a system to it!"
Jackson practically jumped on his feet with little consideration of his girlfriend as she looked across the room, "There's a system to everything this government does!"
"Jackson," Eliza said hesitantly as her eyes looked to the other side of the room.
"What?" Jackson asked.
"Someone's here," she said, her eyes growing wide with fear.
Following Eliza's line of sight, Jackson could see the entrance to their destroyed stairwell. Sure enough, several fingers crept over the edge, then another full-fledged hand. As they quieted down, they could hear the sounds of bodies shifting around.
"Jackson?" Eliza pleaded softly.
Getting up as quickly as he could under the circumstances, Jackson grabbed his sledgehammer from the floor. Picking it up, he managed to swing it in a high arc, slamming down on the hand with a bone-shattering crunch.
Shane howled out in pain as every bone in his left hand was crushed. The tower of Shane, Bo and Big V collapsed to the floor in a pile of flesh. Shane just moaned loudly, cradling his hand as he rolled into the fetal position on the ground.
"OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWW!" he wailed, crying as he could feel his hand swell. Getting up quickly, Bo, Mike and Joel held out their guns and started firing up the ruined stairwell as Jackson dodged to the side. Without a great grip on the tool, he lost his sledgehammer and let it fall to the floor beside Shane.
"OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWW!" Shane wailed again as Joel, Mike and Bo continued firing shots into the wall upstairs.
"Where'd he go?" Mike hollered.
"I dunno!" Bo yelled back, trying to listen as Joel continued emptying the remaining shells from his shotgun. In the moment of silence that followed after they stopped shooting, they could hear pounding around in the floorboards above them. Trying to fake calmness yet being anything but, Joel loaded two rounds into his shotgun, looking up every so often to catch a glimpse at their attacker. Looking down, he loaded another round, and then up again to catch a quick glimpse of a flame.
"Shit! Duck!" Joel quickly yelled, jumping to the side. Acting on instinct, Bo followed his leader while Mike just took a second to look back upstairs. The first Molotov cocktail exploded four feet from Mike, burning his jeans and igniting his letterman jacket. He screamed in pain, tearing the jacket off and tossing it to the side, then rolling on the ground out of the way as Joel, Bo and CC did their best to beat out the flames.
The second Molotov cocktail fell short of its targets, or more precisely straight to the ground. This could be attributed to Jackson's lack of accuracy because of the drugs in his system, or maybe the fact that he'd burned his hand on the flaming wick and just dropped it. No matter, he didn't have much longer to worry about it.
As the bottle shattered on the concrete ground below, it engulfed the prone Shane into a ball of fire, causing his earlier wail to turn into an inhuman scream as he leapt to his feet and ran around the room. Bouncing off one wall, he turned the slight hall that had protected his friends and looked to them with what little eyesight he had left. Like the obedient puppy he had been in their eyes, he looked for their help, their compassion. Instead he got a blast of buckshot to the face from Joel, taking him down and out of the Battle Royale.
Acting quickly, Joel opened up the folding stock of the Spas-12 shotgun, bracing it against his shoulder as he did a quick roll on the ground. He caught a quick view of Jackson standing upstairs, holding a bottle and desperately trying to light it with his trademark Zippo lighter, he made an easy target.
Pumping the shotgun, Joel fired once, striking Jackson in the belly. Pumping it again, Joel fired the last round in the weapon, peppering Jackson in the chest with bits of lead. Braiwood's class stoner was taken off of his feet by the sheer force of the last blast, throwing him to the floor very dead before his girlfriends' eyes.
"Jackson!" Eliza shrieked as she watched the man she loved collapse to the ground in a bloody heap. No, it wasn't possible, it just couldn't be!
She crawled over, noting some gunshots from below striking the ceiling and wall behind her, but she was in a different world. All she knew was Jackson. She didn't know the shot that grazed the back of her neck in a spray of blood, but she knew her boyfriend's face. His eyes were closed, his face in an odd state of peace. It was odd, she had somehow expected that he would be grimacing, or in pain, but no. His face was at rest, his eyes closed.
He wasn't dead. Really, in our world of course he's dead, but... Eliza subscribed to an interesting mixture of religions, taking a belief here, a deity there, some from the east, some from the west. The light, the dark, she took the beliefs she felt most reflected her sensibilities and went with them. In all honesty, that's what helped her most as she cradled his head. Jackson wasn't dead, he'd just gone to another plane of existence, the other side, heaven, whatever you choose to call it. He'd gone to the better place where those who led good lives went, and although he wasn't exactly what anyone would call one of the most virtuous people in the world, he had enough heart and soul deep down inside him to at least get him a spot at the front of the line at the pearly gates.
He's waiting for you...
Another shot rang out from downstairs, striking her in the shoulder and shocking her back to reality. It whirled her from her crouching position, knocking her to the floor and into the legs of a table.
As she impacted, one of the numerous Molotov cocktails fell to the floor and shattered in a spray of gasoline. She looked to the spreading puddle, smelling the rich smell of fuel and knew what she must do.
She stood up, pulling herself to her feet by grabbing onto one of the table's legs. She grabbed the Molotov cocktails from the table one at a time, throwing them around the top floor of the brig. She threw them against the wall, on the cot, in the closet, breaking them on the floor at her feet. With the last bottle in hand, she pulled the cloth out and poured it over her head, burning her eyes and skin, though not enough to make her really care.
Dropping the bottle, she got back on her knees, crawling over to Jackson's remains. Still clutched in his hand was his Zippo lighter, J&E engraved into the side. She smiled wistfully with a tear in her eye, bending down to place one last kiss on his lips.
"I love you Jackson," Eliza said more tearfully, "I always have, I always will."
Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while. Taking in a breath, she pulled the Zippo from his fingers and opened the top.
The four members of the wrestling gang ducked to the ground as the floor above them burst into a massive ball of fire. Flames danced on the boards above them, as more were busted out and thrown their way. While the top of Joel's hair was singed off, he didn't notice as he simply made a sprint for the doors.
"Get your asses outta here guys, this place is going down!" he shouted as he ran with his head low and Bo, CC and Mike shortly behind.
Running out into the driving range, they watched as flames gutted the roof and windows on the buildings upper floor, breaking glass and collapsing much of the wooden roof as the fire stretched into the sky.
"Fucking fuck!" Mike shrieked as he nursed the burns on his arms and legs in the rain, "This is fucked up man!"
"Jesus Christ, did you see what happened to Shane?" CC shrieked.
"Hey, hey, HEY!" Joel yelled, pointing his shotgun into the sky, then aiming it back at the ground as he remembered the rain pouring around them, "We lost our man, but we killed at least two people in there. Shane died instead of us, he served his purpose, now we gotta serve ours. We still have to get to the airfield and get the guns!"
"Joel man, I'm hurting real good here!" Mike yelled over the pounding rain, looking at his skin as it started to peel away, "I got burned real bad man."
"Can you walk?" Joel asked as he shook the water from his hair.
"What?" Mike asked, tending the blisters on his arm.
"CAN YOU WALK?" Joel asked, his eyes bugging out slightly and frightening the others.
"Yes, but what the-"
"Then we're going to the airfield!" Joel yelled, "If you can't make it to the airfield I'll shoot you right now and make it easier for all of us. So, are you hurting?"
For a moment, Mike just considered whipping out the Beretta he had tucked back into his belt and blasting Joel repeatedly with it, but the shotgun barrel aimed squarely at his chest was something of a good deterrent.
"Actually, I think I'm feeling a lot better now!" Mike yelled, "Let's go to the airfield!"
"Good," Joel said as he lowered his shotgun. He pointed subtly with the barrel, but the message was clear enough. Mike V. started walking, desperately tearing at his shirt to make some bandages for his arms. CC was soon to follow, afraid of her boyfriend while knowing enough of what bad would come from not doing as he was told.
Bo was the last to follow, and was a bit more hesitant than the rest. He had no problem going along with Joel and the rest of his wrestling hooligans, but even he knew enough to know that something wasn't right here. Joel was a strong guy, a competitor to no end, but Bo was more than capable of knowing evil when he saw it. Staring into Joel's eyes before turning away to follow Mike and CC, he knew he saw it. That glimmer in the back of his eyes, that slight curve to his grimace that almost formed a smile. Joel was evil in the flesh, and Bo didn't want anything to do with it.
He'd have to be careful though, Joel had the big gun. Just shoot, or run, or both, just get the fuck out of here.
"Come on Bo, we need to keep frosty," Joel said quickly, putting his arm around Bo's shoulders in a friendly manner and lowering his voice, "Mike's hurtin and might need to be put down soon, you're going to be my eyes and ears and muscle. You and me can finish this all off."
He'd heard that tone many times before. It was Joel being charismatic and cocky at the same time, playing the schemer and the king of the world at the same time. He couldn't let it happen, no, you can fool most folk but you can't fool the Brits, "That's not bad," Bo said, "not bad at all..."