the assassination of abraham watanabe by the coward abraham watanabe

[dmboogie]

((“You shouldn’t have come here.”))

Quick, raise the gun, take half a second to aim, you’ve always been more of a spray-and-pray type of guy anyways, pull the trigger, whoops, safety’s on, but that’s fine, this is just practice, this is just a demonstration, you leave the safety on so you can pull the trigger at your imaginary target-practice sucker.

“Uh oh!”

Yeah, that’s right, uh oh, uh oh for anyone who met him, haha. Stick ‘em up, punk, stand and deliver, ‘cause Abe’s the quickdraw champion of the west with his minigun, not a literal minigun, a miniature gun, like an uzi or whatever the hell, why were miniguns called miniguns, they were fucking huge? C’mon, cowards, give him a minigun and a vantage point, he’d get some work done.

“I’m gonna kill you.”

That boy needs therapy. Everyone in attendance nods, yep, yep, but too bad there’s no one for miles and miles around, so in order to get some therapy, he’s gonna need some therapy, if you catch his drift? He could cry about it later. He’d have a lot of things to cry about later, but he needed there to be a later, first, which meant everyone else wasn’t gonna have a later a lot sooner, y’know?

“Gimme your stuff, asshole!”

Again and again, he practiced the motion. Zero to a hundred in a second flat. He tried all the positions. Wearing both bags, no bags, sitting on the ground, spinning around to catch some bastard sneaking up behind him. It was the same every time - raise, aim, safety click, shoot. If it hadn’t been for the bush mouse’s helpful demonstration he’d be keeping the safety off all the time, save him a precious second and some brainpower he could dedicate to blasting a fool, but gun safety wasn’t just a catchphrase, and he’d really rather not accidentally shoot himself in the gut somehow.

“Fucking die.”

Rooty-tooty-pointy-shooty bang bang drop dead motherfuckers. He wasn’t a man anymore. He was a tightly wound ball of muscle memory and firepower. A rat king cockroach. That’s just the way it had to be if he wanted the chance to be himself again. He needed to be able to move without thought, like a zen monk that hadn’t internalized any of the spirituality shit and was just real good at punching people.

“Stick em’ up!”

He had to be ruthless. Not a psycho, just ruthless. Abe really didn’t hate anyone, wasn’t looking to settle any grudges with maximum overkill. He wasn’t gonna fucking gun down everyone in sight - he only needed one kill. Axel and Forrest were his two biggest worldly attachments, and one of those two chains had just been shattered, along with any semblance of normalcy he’d been clinging to.

“Sorry, pal!”

Abe was stuck in a completely different world, adrift in the timeline of his life, disconnected from reality, and that meant he wasn’t really Abe anymore, right? No matter who he’d been back in the real world, as long as he was a George Hunter kid he would’ve wound up in the same boat, or, well, the same bus, so that meant he was basically interchangeable, right? Everyone on the island was interchangeable, now. He didn’t even need to look at their faces, just their hands, the fat bags slung over their shoulders. The shit that actually mattered.

“Better luck next time!”

One person was getting out alive. Abe had already decided it’d be him, so the rest didn’t matter. He was the winner, which meant everything he did automatically justified itself, because everything the winner did contributed in some way to winning, and that’s why they were the winner, right? And the people that lost were always gonna lose, so the matter of who-killed-who was all semantics.

“One-liner!”

Abe was still by the aviary, clutching Axel’s body, sobbing his eyes out like he should’ve, both of them pristine and frozen in time forever, no corpse stink, and Hel was there too, and then he was gonna open his eyes and suddenly be home after the winner did all the hard work, that’s how it was gonna turn out, alright? It was that easy to compartmentalize, right? He tried referring to himself as the winner in his inner monologue but it sounded real dumb so he decided Abe was still fine, just, had to keep it in the back of his head, he wasn’t Abe, easy.

“Boom.”

Priority number one was avoiding what passed for civilization. He’d had the right idea way back on day one, he had to be a man of the woods now. The other kids in the game were walking loot pinatas, yeah, that’s all they were, but every encounter with them was a chance for things to go horribly wrong. He remembered being on the wrong side of Lorenzo’s gun, how easily he could’ve lost right then and there, and it scared him, alright, it terrified him. Never again, he wasn’t gonna do shit unless he had the obvious advantage. At least there was no one left for him to put himself in danger for, haha.

“That’s all, folks.”

He was starting to get a little out of breath. He’d have to do more practice later, every chance he got, ‘till he imagined himself doing the moves every time he closed his eyes, like after you’d played a video game all day and you could feel yourself holding the controller and pressing the buttons long after you were done, that basic concept, just, a lot more fucked up.

The scenic overlook was a pretty decent place to chill, except for Tristan’s dead body, which was kind of ruining the vibe. Fuck, goddammit, it wasn’t Tristan, it was a dead body. It’s fine, it’s fine, he was still getting used to the whole dehumanize and face to bloodshed thing. He’d considered using it for a bit of live fire practice, but his ammunition was limited, and it’d make noise, and really wouldn’t help him that much at all. He wouldn’t have felt bad. Not at all. Absolutely no guilt whatsoever about riddling the corpse of the guy Axel had broken down over with tiny lil’ holes. That’s just business as usual when you were the best survivalist.

Just had to keep lying like that and it’d eventually just, become the way he thought, right?

((Easy.))