INT: DARK ROOM - THE END OF THE WORLD

[Grim Wolf]

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Daria Bhatia: START

In. Out. In. Out.

There's serenity in simple breathing, if you can strip away your thoughts and simply let the air flow and your thoughts flow with it. Daria doesn't remember when she learned this. She doesn't remember having to learn it at all. As far as she can tell, she's always known it, even though she often forgets. When her thoughts get too crazy, when the pressure was too intense and her anxiety boiled, when her parents were making her feel guilty for one imagined slight or another; if she can just take a breath, and find that place of still, quiet calm between inhale and exhale, everything settles. Everything feels possible.

In. Out. In. Out. In out in out in out in out.

No. Not like that. Too fast. You sound like you're panicking. You're not panicking, Daria. You're a little scared, sure. A little shaky. Anyone would be, what you just saw.

But a bad bitch like you wouldn't panic. No matter what just happened, or what you just saw. No matter how Ms. Garcia's spattered, shattered form keeps flashing through your mind, lightning horror cracking across boiling clouds of anxiety.

In out in out inoutinoutinout

She rolled over, burying her face in the floor of the house she'd woken up inside. She didn't let herself breathe. She let the stillness of the moment expand, and expand, and expand. She wanted her lungs to ache, and her mind to clear. She wanted serenity.

No serenity. Her pulse still throbs rabbit-fast against the cold metal bound around her neck. The blood-smeared, distorted face of Ms. Garcia throbs with equal intensity across her mind. Every now and again, the throbbing face changes. Every now an again, it's her face.

“MotherFUCKERS!” Daria snarled, and burst to her feet. Fine, no serenity. She didn't need serenity. Maybe she needed rage. Maybe she needed a weapon to knock the shit out of the first terrorist fuck she came across.

There was a duffel bag on the ground not far from where she'd awoken: she fell to her knees and unzipped it, digging through its contents. First aid kit, handwarmers, loaves of bread, bottles of water...

Searched again. more frantically, tearing through the contents of the bag, flinging the first aid kit here, the hand warmers there, the water bottle bouncing off a nearby wall.

Nothing else. No weapon.

You're going to die.

She was hunched over the duffel bag, no order to her breathing, no serenity, no rage. It felt like a pool of ice was spreading slowly inside her chest, frost trickling through her veins. Ms. Garcia's face flashed once. Then again. And now Ms. Garcia's face was gone entirely, now every throb of terror was accompanied by a vision of Daria's reflection, her black hair smeared with bloody and splintered bone and specks of grey, Daria's forehead split and spilling rivulets of flesh down her terrified face, and with every vision the ice inside her pulsed and deepened, threatening to seal her lungs with cold.

You're going to die.

No no no she wouldn't there had to be away out of this, the President would come and save them, the army would come and save them, someone would come and save them, she'd remember Ms. Garcia, she wouldn't let her death be in vain.

You don't have a weapon. There's a bomb strapped to your neck. No one's ever stopped them.

Her hands were knotted deep in the material of the duffel bag. It was taking everything she had not to sob.

Wait. Why didn't she want to sob? That would be a normal reaction, right? She'd just seen someone die. It was the first corpse she'd seen since her great grandma's, that humid funeral in her uncle's big house in Indore. She recalled the sunken face, the flesh pale and muddled as candle wax. She'd sobbed then, even if she hadn't known her great grandma well. She'd felt the weight of her absence. The weight of her nothingness. She'd known that same nothing would pull her in one day, and everyone and everything she'd ever loved.

But even then, it hadn't been as pressing as this. The sodden, suffocating weight of her mortality radiated like cold heat from the collar around her neck. Why not sob?

Fuckers put a bomb around my neck and told me to kill my friends and they think I'm gonna cry for'em?

Anger again, but different than before, sharper somehow. It didn't battle the cold inside her: it co-opted it. She felt her fear and terror being transfigured into something else. Defiance as icy as her fear. Determination as hot as her rage. No matter what, she wouldn't play their game.

Well. That was easy to say. She didn't have a weapon. She couldn't play their game.

Anger and fear both faded. Her grip slackened on her bag. The world felt like it was falling away around her.

She didn't want to play their game. She wanted to hurt them. Hurt them worse than they'd hurt Ms. Garcia. She wanted to tear them open and leave them bleeding. But she had no weapon, and a bomb around her neck, and no idea what she was supposed to do.

It's a game.

Yeah, they'd made that pretty clear.

Games have rules.

Did they? Their idiot boss didn't make that very clear. None of them did. Honestly they felt...unpolished? It was such a weird word, but the whole encounter had felt surreal. Besides the grim reality of Ms. Garcia's corpse, all their pretense and performance seemed...childish. Like kids trying to pretend they knew what they were doing. He'd even forgotten...

Everyone dies if no one dies.

She sat with that for a moment. She considered it from every angle. Everyone dies if no one dies. If everyone dies, you don't die. Lovely little paradox there. Turn a massacre into a binary choice. Make them do it.

What if they didn't?

Daria slowly stood up, brushing off her skirt. She searched the room until she found what she was looking for: a camera in the corner above a granite countertop. It was trained on her.

Oh, they must have known her very well. Already a camera ready for her. I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.

She cleared her throat and waved. “Hey!” she said. “Hey! You! Terrorist...” She searched for a good word. “Guys.” That wasn't it. Fuck. Wasted moment. “I need a...” Come on, don't fuck up again. “I need a rule clarification.” She tapped her collar. “Your boss dude. Danyuh?” She wasn't sure she was pronouncing that right, and she didn't particularly care. “Kinda dropped the ball on the presentation. We all die if no one dies, right? These things blow.” Her mouth quirked for a moment. "I mean, blow-up. Not just...you get it." Another tap to her collar. “And accidents and suicides don't count?” She leaned up, pointing her finger at the lens as close as she could manage without touching the camera. “So if someone shoots me and I shoot myself, do they still get credit? Get back to me. I've got time.”

She liked this voice she'd taken on. A little meandering, a little sardonic, good-natured without being naive. Just a little cooler than her normal voice. Just a little more confident. Needed to figure out that voice. Needed to figure out what she was planning on doing. Needed to feed this seed, and see what it became.
It might kill her, and Daria did not want to die (a flash of fear then, cold and heavy and choking, so in the middle of gathering her stuff together again she froze as though struck, her broken reflection bleeding at her wherever she turned her mind's eye).

But more than that, she didn't want to die for these terrorist assholes. She wanted to hit them where it hurt. Above all else, she wanted to show them the terrible mistake they'd made thinking they could tell Daria Bhatia what to do.

On you mark...Action

(Daria Bhatia continued in Shoegazing)