Performance Concerns

[Slam]

((Junji Yamada continued from The Arrow in Your Heart))

Junji had repeated his tactic from the first night of taking cover on a high rise boat, and had once again been uninterrupted. It was good, because he didn't want to have to deal with those other fucking cunts right now.

The gun and knife both remained on his person, but they didn’t bring the same thrill they had when he had first laid his hands on them. The knife just made him think of Cristo, looking up at him as his face went down into the depths. He could feel the orange preserver in his hand still, taunting Cristo with a life that was about to end. How fucking stupid had that been. The gun conjured up images of Rebecca, choking up blood when he had wanted to save her. He had left her to her fate and high tailed it out of there. Dale was barely worth considering next to that.

The announcements hadn’t mentioned her or his name, whatever that meant. They had been late to bring up kills before, maybe they were just doing it this time too. Ratchet up the suspense, or something. Fucking TV execs. Dale was definitely dead. So was Rebecca. Maybe they were too busy jerking off to do their jobs right. Fuck, it had been a long time since he had popped his pickle back on the first day.

He had eaten, but only enough to get by. He needed to find some more supplies soon anyway, because this basic-ass ration pack wasn’t going to last forever and he was a big fucking fatass man. He needed more food than the rest of these fucks to get by. And he wanted something good tasting to take his mind off everything else.

Fuck.

The boredom that had plagued him the day before wasn’t as much of an issue with so many things on his mind. The people he’d killed, the people he still had to kill if he wanted to go home. Stokes was still alive, that was good. Even if she had decided he wasn’t worth hanging around with. What the fuck, Stokes? Fucking bi-, fuck, that wasn’t cool.

No, fuck, he didn’t want to go home. This was his dream, to be on SOTF-TV, kill everyone who’d ever looked at him cross-eyed, and be a fucking hero for it. He wasn’t going home. He’d be the first TV contestant to kill every fucking player in the game. Even his own teammates, if he had to. Fuck, he already had!

He gripped his temples with both hands as veins throbbed in his head, little concern for whatever was going on around him. Back home, he could distract himself from this bullshit with a binge of violent media or hardcore pornography. He didn’t have to be alone with his thoughts, because the world was more than happy to provide him with a constant stream of distractions. They made the cash, Junji kept going on in blissful ignorance of his own mind. And if he had violent fantasies that might've seemed disturbing to the average listener, well, that's what they were cashing in on! Yin, Yang, just as the Chinese had obviously envisioned it all those years ago.

But on SOTF-TV, there was no-one distracting him from what he had done, what had happened, or what he was still going to do. That escapist fantasy that they’d shown on TV, where you spent all your time running between kills, being a star, living or dying by the sword like the days of olde, was just that: a fantasy.

The reality was that achieving his dreams and appearing on SOTF-TV was no easier or harder than anything else in life. He still had to do the boring shit like taking a piss, stuffing his face and waiting for the day to end, and the people back home only saw the highlight reels. If you took out the thrill that came with killing people, especially people who were trying to help you, then it was the same as day to day life, just with the added factor that you could die at any minute. If you weren’t afraid to die then that was just a minor detail, and his own mortality seemed less and less important to Junji by the day, as trivial a detail as it might’ve been in the first place.

He slapped himself across the face.

Fuck.

He was sick of thinking.

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck fuckf ufkc ufkufckafdufkcukf fukckcfufFFUCK.

((Junji Yamada continuedFUCKFKFJCFUCKin Existence))