we took all that we could carry but we tried to carry more

[dmboogie]

((Abe cut an almost comical figure as he weaved his way through the trees.))

One bag slung over each of his shoulders, P90 clutched desperately tight in his sweaty, sweaty hands because he’d just fukken seen what happened when you played around with fun guns, red-faced and completely out of breath.

He ran, realized there was really no one after him, then kept running some more just to be safe, because that’s what you did when you pissed off people who had the firepower to enforce petty lil’ notions like ‘property’ in the anarchy zone.

Eventually, he stopped running, ‘cause he wasn’t a star of track and fuckin’ field, or even an assteroid that had burnt up in orbit, typo intended. He stopped running, and stopped standing, and started communing with the worms in the soil.

He’d really done that, huh? Stolen from people who’d expected better from him. Yoinking poor No-one’s gun and shit had probably been technically worse on the morality scale, since she’d been completely defenseless, but he still felt shitter about his second burglary. It’d been a betrayal. A betrayal of people he didn’t really like, who probably shouldn’t have trusted him in the first place, but still. Abe had lived his life up to this point by just trying to be a chill dude, not screwing anyone over like half the goddamn social spiders at the school seemed to spend their time doing.

Didn’t feel good, being the bad guy, but it felt pretty damn nice to shotgun a water bottle and know he had plenty more left where that came from. He ravenously chomped down a ration bar afterwards, which was a pretty shitty breakfast but still. He could probably live with this - and that was the point, wasn’t it? Living with it? He could cry about the terrible guilt of it all to his therapist or whoever the fuck once he made it out.

For now, he could at least feel good about not killing anyone. He figured that most people could still say the same, so that was a pretty fuckin’ low bar for him to clear, but it’d probably be more and more of an accomplishment as the days went by, and one of those days, he would have to trip over that bar, and the sooner he came to terms with that the better.

You had to punch someone off this mortal plane to punch your ticket back to the real world, after all. Sacrifices would have to be made, by other people, and he knew and easily accepted it, but goddamn did he not want to hurt anyone. Like, yeah, screwing people over probably contributed to their death in some vague sense, but that was all, like, butterfly effect and shit he didn’t have to think about. Actually hurting people, though?

Like, he’d had literally nothing to do with Beryl’s death, not even some vague ‘oh my god I could have done something’ survivor’s guilt, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Before-and-after images flickering in his mind, person-corpse-person-corpse, two realities separated by two minutes, time playing a trick on everyone because the transition couldn’t be that fast, right? It couldn’t happen that fast for him too, right?

Abe figured that if he was going to live with himself afterwards, look his folks in the eye afterwards, self-defense would probably be his best bet. Plausible-deniability-self-defense a close second. When the time came, maybe he wouldn’t even have to think about it. His body would just move, and do what he needed it to do, and he’d wake up in the end, still alive, maybe some mysterious bloodstains on him. That’d be nice.

He wasn’t in a rush to put himself in a position where he needed to defend himself, though. Day had been excitin’ enough already, he was looking forward to some quiet contemplation. Excessively sober contemplation. God, he’d kill for a blunt - figuratively. He wasn’t that much of a piece of shit stoner.

Having finally caught his breath, it was time to dig into the second bag of goodies he’d pilfered. There probably wouldn’t be anything exciting in it - everyone had been carrying their guns, after all - but there was still a sense of giddy anticipation in opening up something that didn’t strictly belong to you.

Number on the bag was B056, which meant it was Jonah’s since Henry had been sittin’ and cryin’ on his bag like a nerd with feelings or whatever the fuck. Abe felt sorta bad about that, because Jonah’d been the least lame of everyone that wasn’t Beryl, but not too bad. As he’d justified to himself earlier, it’s not like the dude was actually missing out on anything, right? Like, guy could just have Beryl’s bag; it’s not like she’d had the time to use up any of her rations. Good as new.

The first thing he found when he opened the bag was ammo, so, uh, whoops. Scratch that. Guess Jonah was stuck with however many shots he had left in his deagle, which probably wasn’t many. Abe was tempted to hang onto it regardless of how personally useless it was, because he was turning into some sorta pack-rat-sack-rat-fucker, but nah, that’d be stupid.

Carrying around two bags was a pretty clear indicator that he was a thieving piece of shit, and he wasn’t really excited to test the effectiveness of his ‘it fell off the back of a truck, I swear’ bluff. He up-ended both bags to take inventory.

Five loaves of bread. Five tins of crackers. Twenty-four energy bars. Nine bottles of water. Two first aid kits. Four P90 clips - magazines? What the fuck were they called? Two copies of all the documentation, which was actually kinda nice in case his map got rained on or some shit, and also in case he direly needed some TP. A growing collection of two name tags - one for No-one, one for Jonah.

Goddamn was he loaded. Bag was getting pretty bulky. Abe was a pretty efficient packer, but he still struggled to zip it closed. If he wanted to continue his high-risk, high-idiocy thievery habit, he would need to keep another bag, but was that honestly even worth it? If he was careful, this’d probably last him until endgame.

Having so many excess supplies that he could afford to gorge himself like a motherfucking hedonism king was a nice thought, though. Full of belly and spry of step while every other miserable coward had a rumbly stomach and a parched throat. That’d be almost tacticool of him, huh? It was nice to have dreams.

Speaking of which, Abe needed to figure out where the hell he was gonna hunker down for the night. He pulled out one of the maps. Given all the healthy-ass trees, it was probably safe to assume he was in the forest, which was honestly his best bet. The houses would probably be nicer, especially if it rained, but there were well over a hundred people on the trip, and if even a quarter of them decided to not let their drears be drears and find a nice little bed to snooze cruise on, it’d be a pretty bad scene.

The woods, on the other hand, covered like a third of the island, so he’d have to be real unlucky to run into anyone else. He’d become a man of the woods, ruggedly handsome and oh-so-ripped. He would be a lumberjack, and he would be okay. Or maybe he’d fuck a lumberjack. That’d be fun too.

He’d only been camping once - back in middle school, with some of his older cousins. It’d been pretty sick - George shot and fuckin cooked a squirrel right there, though Abe had been too chicken to try it out. Marshmallows under a dark sky, away from the city lights.

Of course, their campsite had been in the middle of a dense fuckin’ forest with many winding, unmarked roads, and the fuckin’ brain geniuses in charge of the expedition had put everyone who knew the way in the same truck, so when the car Abe was in lost sight of the others, like twenty-fuckin-miles away from cell coverage, they’d spent the next four hours hopelessly lost until his chucklefuck relatives came back for them.

Abe’d known that they should have just stayed in the same place until the lead truck realized they weren’t behind them; but he’d just been thrilled to be along for the ride, so he hadn’t said shit while Adam and his girlfriend decided it’d be a great idea to try and find their own way out.

If no one blew his brains out in the middle of the night, this lil’ expedition would probably be less eventful, for better or worse. Abe did his best to read his compass and meandered towards the coast - always nice to have one less direction shitheads could run at you from. He chucked Jonah’s bag - now empty, except for the ammo and the trash from his breakfast- into the clearest clearing he could see. If the dude managed to trip on it and get his gun juice back, well, that’d be pretty alright. Then he set off.

He wasn’t really a hiker at the best of times, and there wasn’t really a trail, so it took him basically the rest of the day to make it to the island’s edge. He was all sweaty and itchy and bug-bitten, and he’d already drank his sorrows away through another one of his water bottles, but at least he hadn’t run into any rightfully vengeful pricks who wanted their stuff back.

Nothing left to do except watch the sun set and chomp down on that bread, fellas. Abe was grateful that he’d packed a heavy hoodie to offset any oppressive bus AC - it made for a nice blanket.

Alone, Abe lay on the ground, head resting on his bulging daypack, gun safely way off to the side. The ocean waved to him from below, the stars twinkled a morse-code-salutation above. Despite everything, it was a pretty alright night.

((Despite himself, Abe wished Forrest was there with him.))