by A. Anders
“Or what? She’ll kill us?” Carl asked with renewed force.
“Shut up, Carl!” Gray ordered.
“This is ridiculous. I’m getting out of here,” Carl announced.
“Sit down!” Gray commanded.
“Let him go,” I countered. “He needs to get some air.”
Knowing that no one was going to stop him, he pushed past us. He exited the front door, beginning another moment of silence for the rest of us.
“So, what do we do?” Brad asked, slowly reintroducing his charming smile.
“We have to go to the compound,” I said looking each man in the eye. “Whoever is doing this, whoever is controlling it is there. The only way we can get off of this island starts with us getting there.”
“Didn’t you say it was on the other end of the island? Walking that would take days,” Gray argued.
“Probably about three,” I admitted.
“Days?” Billy asked. “We may as well be playing Russian roulette. How many of us are gonna die before we get there?”
“And did you know that there are wild animals on this island?” Brad asked with beaming smile. “Turns out, the only thing that keeps us alive is a fence. And it’s a long way from that fence to end of the island.”
I wondered how Brad knew about the panthers. Had he crossed the fence like I had? Why would he have done that? Had he already tried to escape?
“I know about the wildlife,” I replied. “But if we don’t go, what are our options? Even if we killed Rose and didn’t immediately die, what would we do then? Wait for a boat?
“No, we would still have to go to the compound. Why? Because the only chance we have of finding a phone is there. And since we have to go anyway, maybe there’s safety in numbers.”
Brad thought for a second and then agreed. “Ah, what the hell. I’m feeling lucky. Of course, Rose did tell me that she’s fallen in love with me. So I’ve got that going for me,” he said, flashing a devilish smile.
I stared blankly at Brad. I didn’t know how to reply. I couldn’t tell if he was telling the truth, or if he was trying to get into our heads again.
I had talked to her quite a bit. Rose had secrets. That meant that she held stuff back. So, even if she could have strong feelings for someone like Brad, which she probably did, I wasn’t sure if she would admit it. Rose wasn’t the type to just tell a guy that she loved him.
“She said the same to me,” Gray added.
“Me, too,” Bob continued.
“Yep, she loves me,” Thorin said, shaking his head.
“Same here,” Billy confirmed, as if it were no big deal.
Everyone’s eyes then shifted to me. My chest felt heavy. They were all waiting for me to speak, but I just stared back at them with my mouth hanging open. I was the only one in the room who she hadn’t professed her love to. Did she really have feelings for everyone here except me?
That was a hard, no, a devastating, thing to wrap my head around. Not only did that say a lot about the connection that I thought I had with her, but the fact that I was the only one excluded out of this group of freaks hit me in my core.
If she found this cleaned up version of me so hard to love, what chance did the real me have? On top of all of that, if I was the only one left here who she hadn’t fallen in love with, then I was definitely the next one gone.
Ya know, I remember when my biggest problem was outrunning a tiger. Situations like these are why people drunk call their ex.
“Well,” I began, taking a deep breath, “it looks like I’m the only one left she doesn’t love. Yet, I’m still saying that getting to the compound is our best chance. And yeah, I realize that it’s three days, and I’d probably be the first one eliminated. But I’m willing to risk it. Are you?”
No longer smiling, Brad was the first to agree. Everyone soon followed.
“One thing, though” Gray interjected. “Whose gonna tell Rose this?”
I knew what he was saying. What if Rose didn’t think this was a good idea? Who wanted to risk upsetting the monster? I certainly didn’t think of Rose as a monster, but as a guy who just learned that he was hanging on by a thread, let’s just say that I could appreciate his point.
Everyone looked at me as if I was going to volunteer.
“We could draw straws,” I offered.
“Agreed,” Gray said looking around for something to use.
Brad pulled down a decorative thatched palm from the wall and fashioned a few straws. We all pulled. I lost.
Great, I thought. My only hope now is that she would be too busy making bad decisions with all of the other guys to shoot the messenger. Did that sound bitter?
Everyone left the lobby, confident in our plan. It was now my job to convince Rose. I didn’t think it would be too hard. Convincing her to risk her life without turning her against me? Now that might be a little more of a challenge for a guy teetering on the edge of elimination.
Returning to where Victor lay, I realized that we had left Rose with a corpse. I took a heavy breath realizing that it couldn’t have been pleasant for her. I felt bad.
“Rose?” I called out, expecting to hear her reply from around a corner. She didn’t reply.
“Carl?” Gray yelled. Carl didn’t reply either.
“He took her,” Brad announced with certainty.
“Did you see them go?” I asked.
“No. But he did,” Brad confirmed.
“This could be bad,” I admitted. “He could kill her and kill us.”
“He could turn her against us,” Brad said.
“We need to find her,” I decided.
“I can look for her at her cabin,” Brad declared.
“I’ll find some weapons,” Gray said.
“I’ll come with you,” I told Gray, not trusting him to have control of all of the weapons.
“Billy and I can check the camp,” Bob volunteered.
“What about me?” Thorin asked. “What should I do?”
“Why don’t you come with us?” Gray offered, completely out of character. “We might need more hands.”
I turned to Gray. “You know where we can find weapons?”
“We had guns for our last challenge, and we had weapons for the Thunderdome. They have to keep them somewhere,” Gray concluded.
He was right. The bots had given us our guns, so that meant that the weapons had to be stored locally. The stockpile had to be somewhere close.
“You know what?” I said with a sudden thought. “I think I know where they might be.”
It was still dark, but the light from the tower lit our path through the woods. It was as bright as a lighthouse. If it wasn’t for the combination of hills and trees between it and the camp, the light would have kept us up at night.
On the day that I had hiked to the tower, I had gotten a better lay of the land. The bear cage, Thunderdome, and the capture the flag field were all a thousand feet from a small rectangular building. I hadn’t given it much thought at the time, but it had to be the storage facility.
As the three of us stood in front of it, I realized that it was bigger than it had looked. It also lacked a door. The pawns levitated on magnetic pulses. It had to be a magnetic combination that allowed access.
“Suggestions?” I asked Gray and Thorin.
“Kick it down?” Gray suggested.
I stepped out of the way, giving Gray full access to the door. Four kicks later and the door was falling off of its hinges. I was impressed until I realized that the easy access meant one of two things: either the producers wanted us to get to the weapons, or they never thought that we would try to escape.
Inside, everything was arranged at pawn height. It had to be some sort of prop room.
“I found the roses,” I said looking at the glass fridge filled with red roses.
“And I found the guns,” Gray said from behind me.
I turned to see Gray cock a Carion. It was a gun similar to the one we used for capture the flag. I
t didn’t have much range, but it was deadly. Considering that it was pocket-sized, I wondered what the producers had had planned for them.
“Is it loaded?” I asked.
“Yes,” Gray said gripping the handle. “And now I’m gonna get some answers.”
Gray stiffened his arm and pointed the gun at me. A wave of heat washed through me. I froze. But then Gray turned the gun and pointed it at Thorin.
“I don’t know who you are,” Gray said to Thorin. “But you’re gonna tell me, or I’m gonna shoot you.”
I wondered if Gray knew he was pointing his gun at Thorin and not me.
“What are you doin’?” I asked him.
“He’s lying to us,” Gray growled. “And he’s gonna tell us everything he knows right now.”
Had I missed something? Sure, he had come back onto the show when he was supposed to be dead. But didn’t everyone agree that that was common on game shows?
“What are you basing this on?” I asked.
“He shot himself in the leg.”
Yes, he had, at the capture the flag challenge. I should have put that together. The angle of his wound was too high to come from anywhere but a downward path.
“Is that it? Maybe he just didn’t want you to shoot him?”
“No. He’s keeping something from us. And he’s gonna tell us, or he’s gonna die.”
“Every person you kill brings your death one elimination closer,” I reminded him.
“Then I won’t kill him. I’ll just hurt him really, really bad.”
Gray aimed the gun at Thorin’s crouch. I had to admit, it was a good threat. Sure, if Gray blew something off, magic dust could reattach it. But would it ever work the same? Who would want to take that chance?
“I don’t know what you think I know, but I’ve told you everything,” Thorin said pleading.
“Yeah. Everything after you were eliminated. But you never once mentioned anything about what you did before you got here. And something tells me that you’re hiding something.”
My chest tightened when I heard his question. What would I say if he turned the gun on me next?
“I was a biotechnician at a research company.”
“Meaning what?” Gray demanded.
“I put chips in people’s head.”
My body stiffened when I heard that. Chipping people was a son-of-a-bitch.
I was very familiar with it because of my work as a corporate recruiter. With corporations getting more desperate to find the next great product, they began hiring “lifestyle researchers.” Basically, what that meant was that they put a chip in a person’s head that gave their research department a continuous stream of everything the person saw and heard.
It was as creepy as all hell, but I heard that it paid well. With jobs hard to find, some found the money too hard to pass up.
Brad had said that he had worked in entertainment. Until he mentioned that he wasn’t chipped, I thought he had meant porn.
The porn industry was alive and kicking thanks to chipping. On some sites, you could watch people having sex from their perspective. And if you were chipped yourself, you could direct connect and experience it first person. I heard that it was better than the real thing.
“What else?” Gray demanded.
“Nothing else,” Thorin insisted. “I went to school for biology, got hired right after graduation, and then worked there for ten years. My life is boring. That’s why I’m here. I’ve seen shows like this. I just thought it would be fun.”
“And what else?” Gray prodded.
“And I thought I might make a connection with the bachelorette.”
“And what else?” he asked again.
“Nothing else. I thought that they brought me back because the audience liked me. And I shot myself because I knew I couldn’t win the challenge, and I didn’t want you to shoot me in the chest. That’s all.”
I thought about what he said for a second. Previously, he had said something similar, but it hadn’t registered.
“You said you thought the audience liked you and wanted you back on the show?” I asked confused.
“That’s what I thought,” Thorin confirmed.
“Is this a live show?” I asked both men.
Gray’s mouth slowly dropped open as he considered the idea.
Thorin’s eyes darted between the two of us. “I don’t know. Isn’t it?” Thorin asked.
“Did someone tell you that it was?” I asked Thorin.
“No. I just assumed that it was. Aren’t all of these shows live?”
I didn’t watch these shows so I turned to Gray.
“No. They’re not,” Gray confirmed. “Who told you that the audience wanted you back?”
“I thought it was Dan, the producer who handled me. But maybe he didn’t. Maybe I just heard one thing and assumed he said something else.”
There was something about Thorin that I found unsettling. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I was beginning to think that it was his profession.
“Didn’t you think chipping people was as creepy as hell?” I interjected.
“I didn’t think much about it,” Thorin explained. “Biotechnical Conflation was what I got my degree in. It was pretty ordinary to me.”
“But you didn’t think that eavesdropping on every moment of people’s life was sick?” I insisted.
“I didn’t work in that division. All I did was put the chips in and take them out.”
“You said that you worked there for ten years. That means that you left the job. Why?” I continued.
“I don’t know. Bored, I guess. I was a glorified tattoo artist without the art. There’s got to be more to life than that, right?”
I understood that. Thorin the Pale wasn’t menacing. Sure, he was a little weird, but how much of that was him just being an awkward tech geek? I didn’t think there was much more to it than that.
Gray seemed to agree with me because he slowly lowered his gun. I had to give him credit for being reasonable. Maybe I had misjudged him, too. I wondered if things between us might have been different if Brad hadn’t forced us to be on opposite sides.
Tucking that thought away for later, I continued my search for useful weapons. I got an uneasy feeling looking at them. It took me a moment to figure out why. It wasn’t the memories from the Thunderdome that made me uncomfortable. It was the smell in the air.
Had these guns been recently fired? Because I could smell smoke. Wait, that smoke smell wasn’t from a discharge.
I looked around the room trying to figure it out. It didn’t smell like burning rubber. It smelled like burning wood. My eyes darted around the room. The walls were made of metal. It wasn’t here.
I ran to the door. Looking out, I found it. Smoke billowed into the air. It was coming from very close.
“Fire!” I said turning back to the men.
“Where?” Gray asked running out to see.
“A quarter mile. It’s close.”
“Then grab the weapons and let’s go,” Gray ordered.
“Don’t you think we should check it out?” I asked.
“I think we should get what we need and get out of here.”
“You do realize that the island we’re on is on fire? It’s an island surrounded by sharks.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t you think we should, at least, try to put it out?”
Gray gave me a frustrated look then agreed. While Gray and Thorin gathered the guns they had loaded, I grabbed a couple of axes and shovels. I was thinking about containing the fire.
When we arrived at the burning building, I was happy to find Bob and Billy already there. I hadn’t been the only one who had thought to put it out. Soon after we got there, Brad ran up, as well.
“What happened?” I asked Bob as the swirling flames roared and leapt into the air.
“We don’t know. We saw the smoke and came over,” he yelled.
I turned back to the building. Considering the humming com
e from within, it had to be the generator room. That was bad.
Pawns were generally good for fourteen hours of power. Eventually, though, they had to recharge. Food would also be a problem without power. Everything we ate was created by food printers. No power, no food.
I scanned the area for solutions. Sixty feet behind the generator room was the water tower.
“We gotta put this out,” I yelled back at the guys. “Come with me.”
With tools still in hand, I ran towards the building. At fifty feet, I hit a wall of heat that whipped my head back. The brutal punch in the face made my eyes water. It burned the air in my lungs. Suffocating, I stumbled backed.
Still dizzy, I slowly circled around. The heat waves distorted the image ahead. The metal tower was the pulsing head of a giant buried to its neck, its green skin bubbling and popping under the blistering heat.
Clearing my head with a shake, the bulbous water tower reappeared. I was already succumbing to the inferno. I knew I had to work fast.
“Look for a valve,” I ordered, stopping in front of it.
The guys looked around the base of the four legs as well as the ground surrounding it. I dropped the tools and hurried towards the metal ladder. Touching it brought crippling pain. Pulling off my shirt, I wrapped the cloth around my hands and climbed.
The heat sizzled my bare back. I wondered how long it would take for my flesh to burn. Cresting the ladder onto the encircling catwalk, I quickly put my shirt back on.
Searching the belly of the beast for a valve, I couldn’t find one. The only things that caught my eye were below: the lights from the resort and the pitch black over the ocean. They gave me an idea, but before I could think more about it, I had to put out the fire.
“Someone throw me the ax,” I yelled down, fighting the roar of the flames.
Bob grabbed it and offered to bring it up.
“No time. Just throw it.”
I was not a circus performer. I didn’t catch axes. But stilling myself, I leaned against the bubbling hot railing and waited.
The ax came at me fast. It flipped end over end. When it was high enough to grab, the only thing within reach was the blade. I stuck my hand out before quickly recoiling it, and the guys scattered as the ax returned to earth.
“Again,” I yelled, feeling my flesh blister through my thin cotton shirt.