OOC: Darnell continued from
Best Served Cold. By the way, not only did I have permission from Laz for the description of what happened to separate the Boxer/Darnell/Ed trio, it was partially his idea.
IC:
"Number twelve to die was Evelyn Richinson."
"Number twelve to die was Evelyn Richinson."
"Number twelve to die was Evelyn Richinson."
"Number twelve to die was Evelyn Richinson."
Like a song on a trashy jukebox, these words were stuck on infinite loop in the mind of Darnell Butler. Every time he raised his sword that he took from Eduardo and brought it down on the thick underbrush with a grunt, clearing the foliage away from his path, those terrible words got louder and louder in his head. His ears were ringing from the noise that only he could hear now that the announcement had ended, as that one name drowned out all the others in his head. Every time the name came up, he felt like someone was slamming a baseball bat into his stomach, and he wanted to scream. Scream, cry, and rage, rage against the dying of the light, the death of a girl who had been one of Darnell's best friends. He wanted to be sick, but he couldn't. He had to keep moving forward. There would be time to mourn later, but he had to press on. Stopping in the middle of the jungle wouldn't make him any less lost, or help him find Dan, Eduardo, or anyone else he was looking for any faster. It was too late for Evelyn, but as much as his heart ached for it he had to ignore it for now. He couldn't let it become too late for Kallie, Guy, Keith, Evan, Gabe, or any of the others he wanted to find.
Knew I couldn't trust that little weasel, but at least he didn't hurt anybody. Why did I even help him, anyway? He tried to KILL me!
Dan, Eduardo, and Darnell had spent the entirety of the previous day after leaving the mess hall trying to find their way through the jungle and making idle conversation, stopping only to rest or eat/drink and once as Darnell made a pair of makeshift crutches for Eduardo from a set of particularly large tree branches and a few vines (to tie the crutches together). They hadn't found anyone, or a way out of the jungle, when night fell, but they found a clearing they could rest in with enough supplies to build a fire small enough to not set the entire jungle ablaze but large enough to scare away any curious predators. They'd set up a rotation so that two people would be sleeping and the third would be keeping watch at any given time, and sometime after midnight, during one of his shifts, Eduardo had taken advantage of the fact that Dan and Darnell were asleep to hobble off. Darnell woke up quickly enough to see Eduardo disappear into the foliage and woke Dan after making sure none of their supplies were stolen, getting the leviathan to help him chase Eduardo down after killing the fire.
In the pitch blackness of the night, it hadn't taken long at all for Dan and Darnell to become separated, just about totally unable to see each other. Trying to keep up audible chatter while staying close had kept them in the same general area for a while, but they eventually ended up splitting up unintentionally, and almost before Darnell knew what happened he had completely lost Daniel "Boxer" Carvalho and was stranded in the middle of the jungle at a time where he couldn't see his hand in front of his face and for all he knew there were predators, traps, and players swarming all over the area. Yeah, he wasn't stupid enough to deny that he was scared. His flashlight only covered so much of the path, and not knowing what might come out of the darkness and lunge at his throat was pure terror. A threat that can't be seen is a threat that can't be dealt with, and Darnell knew that if some psycho kid with a gun popped out from behind him and started pulling the trigger, he wouldn't even get to try to defend himself. That was the worst part, that some random nutjob from Southridge's hallways could take him out and he wouldn't even know it was happening until he was dead already.
Still, as unnerving as the atmosphere was, Darnell had known that he had no choice but to keep going, and after a while the sounds of the island's flora and fauna, uninterrupted by gunfire or explosions or screams, were rather soothing. He kept his flashlight in one hand, his sword (it had taken him a while to stop calling it "the sword" and start thinking of it as "his sword"), and his ears out for any noises that would signify trouble. Fortunately for him there were no Vietnam War style ambushes, nor did any animals see him and think "lunch!", and he was able to find a path through the jungle fairly uneventfully. After a couple hours his eyes even started to adjust to the darkness, so he could actually see. Walking along the path, listening to the crunching noise of his feet treading over plant growth and dirt in combination with the wildlife around him, thinking about how he was going to get the team and all the rest of his friends together and how they'd all bust the game wide open, he realized that at such a late hour the island was actually refreshingly peaceful.
The peace was, of course, shattered once the announcement started up at dawn. The sheer number of deaths in the past day forced him to pause, stunning him with the sheer surprise of the fact that so many were dead, and so many were killers. What really hurt, though, was how he knew every single one of the people Danya listed. He knew their names, he knew their faces, he had sat with them in class, he had walked past them in the halls, he had spoken to them, laughed with some of them, argued with others, almost fought a couple in days gone by, and the surest thing was the fact that because of them there had never been one dull day at Southridge. Now they were dead. Murdered by people they had gone to school with for four years, some of them in brutal ways that made Darnell wince just hearing about them.
As it turned out, that wasn't even the worst part. Standing on that path in the middle of the jungle, Danya's words rebounded and smacked Darnell right in the face. "Number twelve to die was Evelyn Richinson."...it was terrible enough that his classmates were dying, but Evelyn Richinson was a name he had never wanted to hear on the announcements. Shocked, moved by sheer disbelief, all he could do was silently mutter "Evelyn Richinson" to himself, almost praying that he hadn't heard right. It was a mistake, Danya was talking about someone else and Darnell had misheard. That had to be the case, Evelyn couldn't be dead. Not her,
anyone but her. This couldn't be happening, it just couldn't. Evelyn wasn't supposed to be dead, he was supposed to get her off the island alive, and she'd become the first woman to ever play in the NFL. They'd been friends since they first met on the team, he had to repay her for all she'd done for him. She couldn't have died before he got that chance! Some director would show up soon, shout "Cut!" and berate Danya for getting his lines wrong.
A few seconds after his internal rant finished, Darnell realized that wasn't going to happen. This wasn't a show, it was real. Evelyn was dead, and Darnell hadn't even gotten to see her one last time. To use a cliché, he "never got to say good bye". He would never see her in this world again. They'd never laugh together again, never play football, never tease each other or talk about how Gabe or Dan or whoever was running a bit slower than usual that day or catching fewer passes, never try to see who could make the worst (yet funniest) joke, never make outlandish bets just to see if they were ever pulled off, just all in all never do anything as friends again. It was over; the next time they'd see each other would be at the Pearly Gates as Saint Peter waved him through with a laugh, and she'd talk about how there weren't any good football teams in Heaven or something. His last memory of her would be them filing onto a bus. Since she had accidentally killed herself instead of being murdered, he couldn't even have the satisfaction of taking revenge.
Other memories of Evelyn soon flooded his mind after that one, as he placed the sword, pack, and flashlight on the ground and simply sat down against a nearby tree. He was never much of a crier, but he gritted his teeth as he tried to prevent his eyes from clouding up, his hands curling into fists as his anger clashed against the pure misery he had been hit with by the announcement in a figurative showdown between the two emotions. He remembered how, when he first joined the Varsity team, she had started to help him with his efforts to get rid of the beastial anger that had been such a pervasive part of his life up to that point, and found himself wondering if he would have succeeded without her help or the help of the discipline provided by his teams. He found himself remembering how in the final stretch of a tough game against a team from San Francisco, Evelyn, Steve, and himself had made up a play on the fly in an effort to confuse the opposing defense. It worked perfectly, not only confusing the Timberwolves' defensive line, but more or less annihilating it, earning the Rebels a hard played victory.
That game had been so tough that Darnell had gone to bed immediately after, something he rarely did, but that play had become their team's signature for a while after. His head went in his hands, recalling how they had trained together, encouraged each other, pushing themselves and each other harder than they had any right to so they'd always be on top of their game. The team had always had a sort of bond, but with Evelyn...it was something else. That was really the only way he could ever have described it. It was nothing romantic, they hadn't been dating or anything, but it just seemed like hearing her name on the announcement left a huge void where something used to be in his gut.
Still, he realized after a few minutes, he couldn't just spend the rest of the game sitting under a tree. It literally wasn't healthy; not only was the ground proving to be an uncomfortable seat, but he was a sitting duck. At any time some player could show up and put a bullet in his head. Evelyn wouldn't have wanted that, he decided, she'd want him to fight, and if he had to go down to do so swinging. Death was an inevitable part of life, especially in SOTF, and if he was going to lead his friends to escape he couldn't,
wouldn't let one death set him back to the point where he couldn't do anything. He was a man, it was time to act like one, to take responsibility and get as many people the fuck off this island as possible. If he died in the attempt? Well he could flip Danya off on the way out the fucking door. The more he delayed, the more people died, and the higher the chances of helplessly listening as even more of his closest friends were listed off as casualties, just additional numbers for Danya's list.
It hadn't taken long after that to pick up his stuff and get going again, but it still took quite a while to get through the forest. By some bizarre twist of fate, though, after a few hours he ran right into Dan "Boxer" Carvalho and Eduardo Trinidad-Villa again. Dan had found Eduardo and started travelling with him, but when they hadn't been able to find Darnell had moved on. It was an awkward conversation, but they eventually decided to just keep going as they had been before. However, after Darnell once volunteered to go up ahead to scout out an area that may have had hostiles, he returned to find that Dan and Eduardo had gone without him. Not forgetting the possibility that he could've just gotten lost and separated, Darnell started to exasperatedly look for them again.
Somehow, that search took the exhausted, hot, hungry, annoyed, and steadily dehydrating Darnell Butler to the airfield. Trudging and hacking through the jungle, he was almost surprised when he finally broke through the treeline entirely, wiping the sweat off of his brow as he saw the two figures in the distance. From where he was, he couldn't really tell who they were, but from the way they appeared to be talking and taking care of each other, he found it safe to assume they wouldn't be too hostile. Deciding to take his chances, he started to walk towards them, holding his sword loosely instead of placing it in the scabbard he took from Eduardo just in case. Eduardo had taught him the hard way that he really couldn't be sure, on this island. As he got closer, it soon became clear who he was approaching, though as he was behind them they didn't seem to notice; Madison Conner and Simon Wood. Simon Wood was relatively normal except for his fucked up arm, but Madison Conner had always seemed a bit odd. It didn't help that Danya had tried to make her sound like a killer in the first announcement. Still, they were usually decent people. Simon appeared to be patching up wounds on Madison, or had just finished doing so, and Darnell found himself hoping he wasn't interrupting anything important.
"Yo!" he would call out when he thought he was close enough, "Madison! Simon! You guys alright?"