Fight the Break of Dawn

[Solitair†]

((Ilya Volkov begins))

As befitting the kind of high-schooler who read heady high art and philosophical texts in his spare time, Ilya spent his time immediately after waking up on the island considering what this next, likely last, phase of his life had left him with. He immediately noticed that the books he brought along with him on the trip were not a part of that. He had hoped to be able to catch up on his reading when he wasn't enjoying the whimsy of Disneyland, but now it looked as though it would never happen. Unless he succumbed to the pressure of the game and committed murder for the sake of survival, the rest of Metro 2033 and Gravity's Rainbow would remain forever unknown to him. Perhaps this was intended to distract from the object of the game, sheer animal survival, though he honestly had no idea how this evil game was supposed to work on a logistical level.

His captors had also deprived him of his dreams and ambitions, though as always a sliver of hope remained. Perhaps the UFC would still be willing to hire a victim of circumstance, forced to murder, to compete and perhaps become the next Brock Lesnar or Randy Couture. Or perhaps the possibility that a man who had broken the civilized man's instinct against killing his fellow man would fall victim to it again, like a man whose shoulder had been dislocated. The ligaments were gone and would never heal, and as such there's much less keeping that shoulder in place for the next fight. As brutal as MMA fights could get, the people in charge would never allow their competitors to come to harm, much less die.

So what did that leave Ilya? His only reading material appeared to be the instructions for his weapon, a block of plastic explosive. C4, they called this old military standby. Touching it with his fingers made its pliability apparent. Somehow this compound that felt like silly putty or mold-able erasers artists used could be used to make an explosion that would devastate a building, to say nothing of a person. In essence, he was given a powerful weapon with a single bullet that would take a long time to aim. No, he thought, aiming wasn't an appropriate analogy. He would have to have foresight in order to use this effectively, foresight and the will to inflict devastation on his fellow man. As he put the block back in his pack, he thought to himself that he certainly had one of those.

But the plan that came to him was an endgame scenario, which left him to deal with the more immediate game with over a hundred participants. Ilya sat on a chair in the office on a loading dock, surrounded by something he recognized as the shipping docks from season 2 of The Wire plus many years and minus all the people.

No, he corrected himself. Not all the people. He had vaguely heard a female voice shouting a desperate expletive over by the docks. When the first sign of human contact penetrated the walls of the office, he almost twitched a muscle and started the process of walking out to see who it was.

Minutes passed and his legs hadn't moved. The opportunity passed him by, and he slumped himself over a desk, letting out a long sigh. He remembered his reaction to the briefing, Mr. Davidge getting his brains blown out, and the grand appearance of Danya the devil. It resembled a drastic onset of illness, to the point where Ilya had to will himself to stay conscious on the slim chance that their captors would impart vital information onto them as a reward for staying awake until they chose to knock them out and scatter them on the island. The other students were horrified, but none of them appeared to be suffering the quiet psychosomatic breakdown that Ilya experienced.

Now he felt the results of that breakdown, realizing that he had been hollowed out, his mind muted, his passions dulled. It was a safe bet to assume that his fellow students were experiencing a slew of negative emotions, but Ilya instead found himself in a realm of calm detachment, as if he was already dead, animating his own corpse.

An hour passed. Ilya didn't want to leave the office. The chair was surprisingly comfortable and he doubted he'd be able to find something of comparable comfort on the island, and there was no threat here. Nobody wanted to kill him for now, and he wanted this moment to last.

That hour taught him that the moment had lasted long enough, however. Any more than that, and his mental state might start to decline even further, beginning a spiral of insanity that would undoubtedly get him killed. He didn't want that, he was almost sure, and so he decided to take a first step outside.

((Ilya Volkov continued in Birds, Bats, and General Flying Things))