Epithet

[MK Kilmarnock]

Their names were Nia and Johnny.

While Danya primarily concerned himself with praising Justin's ability to flail wildly and end lives doing it, Justin whispered each of their names to himself. The announcements were too loud or he was not loud enough - it didn't matter who was at fault - so he couldn't hear the names but he knew they escaped his lips. They were the first people he'd killed without knowing their names as he did it. It wasn't altogether baffling he didn't know their names; Justin knew the names of most of his classmates so far as he could recall, just a few holes here and there in the knowledge. The people he shared next to no classes with, the people he never talked to and who never talked to him for better or worse. They never befriended him, but they never antagonized him. Either way, they never deserved this.

No. It should have been reasonable just as a fact by itself that he didn't know Nia before she was a heap on the floor. Johnny before he started laughing, before he stopped laughing. Two faces out of a crowd and you just can't pick them all. But he'd known Benedict even as he ran up to him. He knew Mackenzie... too well. And Jackson - Justin was raked up his back in retroactive recognition of Jackson's name on the announcements. Three kills of his had been announced today. If there was somebody on this island still not paying attention to his name, he realized morosely, that type of person probably didn't exist anymore. He forgot that Jackson was also today. Was it today? Was it last night, or this morning, or early in the morning before that last one but after some arbitrary cutoff where the terrorists weren't going to count it and...

Putting everything on a timeline made his head hurt. It was all thinking about the unnecessary, anyway, without answering the question he'd laid out for himself. Why, if for no other reason he could think, was it uncomfortable he hadn't known their names until now? Did the discomfort lay there, in learning them now when they were glassy-eyed stills burned into the back of his eyelids, or something else entirely?

The announcements didn't give them his answer, but they did offer some other form of direction. He... he and a girl, Tirzah. Tirzah Tirzah Tirzah. Hard to forget that name. Tirzah Tirzah. Tirzah Fox? The face flashed in his mind as he decided he knew her. It didn't matter whether he did or not, he was about to be forced to meet her soon anyway. Given why they were both going to the same place, she probably wasn't the type to judge him for having killed somebody. Didn't mean she wouldn't be dangerous, though. There were more reasons to fear somebody might be violent than simple stupid retribution.

Justin sighed, figuring he didn't have much of a choice. Another gun could always be helpful. The girl- Nia's guns were his now and that opened a world of possibilities, but more guns equaled more defense in his mind, culminating in a cartoonishly exaggerated logical conclusion where he was just buried under a mountain of guns, spraying so many bullets nobody could get near him in his hyperbolic spraying and praying. One step closer to THAT couldn't have been a bad thing. The real draw though, if he had to admit it to himself, was food. Real goddamn food, southern food at that.

Justin got halfway through muttering to himself that he could kill for some chili right now before realizing just how ironic that statement was. Once he'd finished suppressing the urge to shoot himself in the foot out of frustration, he thought to check his map.

Rice Paddies. Huh. He was kinda near to there already.

((Justin Greene, continued in Guy's Grocery Games))