Preface

[Rattlesnake]

Preface, Broken Wings

This is an account of the thirty-eight students from Colehurst Secondary School’s class of 2013 who disappeared on a school trip in the summer of last year, and how thirty-seven of them never made it back.

These are the details of what happened in the five days of silence before the feeds popped up and the reporters standing in front of my school pushed the national zeitgeist from somber to frantic. Before the president addressed the nation and made promises that were already broken, launching with a word an unprecedented dragnet search that was swift and bold and efficient as it was futile, because there was nothing left to be found but a smoldering pyre.

Maybe they underestimated how quickly we could tear ourselves to pieces. Or maybe it was simple, irrational hope that spurred the searchers on. I am no stranger to either. Both are plausible. Admirable, even. But the truth of the matter is that the tragedy of what happened on that island had played out to the very end before the outside world even caught caught a glimmer of it.

It was left to the architects of the 24-hour news cycle to profane it with their running tally of the carnage, bringing despair to every living room for the sake of ratings. Men who, even when the search concluded and it became clear that the “live” feed was nothing but the echoes of the deceased, gave platform to every pundit and talking head who wished to elbow forward and wax poetic about the impropriety of the checks they cashed in crimson ink.

But that is your story. This is my story, and the story of my friends and enemies and acquaintances, and the fate that none of us deserved. How it was that in less than a week’s time a bus full of bright faces and bright futures reduced itself to one dazed survivor kneeling alone in a pool of his own gore. And yes, how six of my classmates died by my hand. An unavoidable truth for which I can make no defense and no apology.

Some have argued, of course, that this all should be simply buried. That to shine light on the impossible choices we faced and the grisly details that followed is to spread terror on behalf of those who made this attack against our country. To you I say that information cannot be left to molder in its supposed grave, for it grows in darkness just as it thrives in the light. Knowledge once sequestered will only spin its tendrils outwards until a perverted form of it forces its way through cracks in the foundations of its coffin.

It is of course impossible to divorce any light from the lens through which it was collected. But just as a lens distorts an image, so does it focus. You will find no better guide to the truth than the illumination I offer. The records exist, of course, both unabridged or cut to the seeker's convenience. I suspect they will continue to exist so long as our collective archives retain the ability to hold a 1 next to a 0. And so too will there always be those who wish to find their own truth. I cannot condemn that inclination. But I have made no effort to tame the truth and make it my own. This has not been a solitary work, and I doubt I could have made any significant headway in that design had I the motive to do so. You will find enough to damn me here if that is your predisposition.

In any case, I cannot do further harm than those who supposed to slake public’s thirst for answers even as they themselves hung on every motion of the men who stepped over streaks of my own blood and searched for my teeth in the ashes.

- Nick Reid, January 6, 2013

[Rattlesnake]

January 13, 2013

Nick felt a little stupid, tapping his heel against the leg of his chair, drumming his fingers on the handle of his cane, looking around the studio and trying not to meet the glassy gazes of the assembled cameras head-on. It wasn't like he hadn't been on camera before, doing things he'd rather not be doing even without a hundred million eyes scanning his every twitch. But this time was... well, he had half a mind to spare for that fact now, he supposed. Nobody was going to come around the corner for him with a knife this time. Probably.

The man from the national news sat straight and tall across a low table, attention turned to a techie with a clipboard and a loop of wire in hand. He looked trim and polished in his fitted suit, his hairdo sharp. Literally, Nick thought, gazing at it. He reached up and gave his own hair a smoothing pass that left it looking exactly the same as before.

"Testing, one, two, three...can you hear me alright?"

It was an odd sensation. The man's voice hit him twice: once, quietly, from across the table, then fractionally later, much louder, directly in his ear. The physicality of the second sound seemed drill a hole in the side of his head, but the words came through the earpiece in a normal conversational volume. Or at least what Nick remembered as a normal conversational volume. He shook his head a little in annoyance and then gave a big nod.

"That's a yes?"

"It's good," Nick said, laying only a bit of edge into the statement.

"We're ready to go when you are," the man said into the air for the ears of the men gathered out of camera shot. One of them stepped in and held up three fingers, counting down to zero.

"This is Mark Christopoulos live from Highland Beach, California," the man began with a strong voice, and then dove into the calculated sympathy worthy of national news. "Stranded on an island and instructed to kill or be killed, now the survivor of the terrorist attack that shook this community and our entire nation is speaking out. Nick Reid has agreed to talk with us in this exclusive interview."

The camera panned back. Nick didn't feel himself slide into frame. He tried not to glance back at it.

“It truly is a pleasure to be able to speak with you,” Mark said.

“It’s uh… Yeah,” Nick said, and borrowed a smile from somewhere. He sat up a little and tugged his sagging hoodie back in over his shoulders as the reporter pushed on.

"Now it has been quite a while since you've taken any requests from people wanting to know your side of the story. A lot of that time has been spent recovering, of course. But why did you feel it was time to come forward and grant us this interview?"

"Well, you know, people have been really curious, naturally" Nick said. "I dunno if you can really call it curiosity, like it seems pretty important to know. And I just didn't really want to say much before. I wanted to get one nice statement and put it out there. So yeah, it's been kind of a long time but now that's done, and... yeah."

"And do you have a statement prepared that you'd like to share with us?"

"Kind of."

He snatched his advance copy of the volume off the table, cover starting to crease from use and corners softening into tiny dogears.

"It's called Broken Wings. Are you gonna flash some graphic on your screen or something? I dunno. But it's all very objective, mostly. What and who and where. There's also stuff that you can't get if you just go back and watch everything. Which I guess that's the 'who' there. And for me, start to finish, there's everything I know in there. All of it. Which means I'm not going to respond to any messages I get anywhere asking me to comment."

A strategic silence. The type he recognized from his therapists.

"Anyways, you can buy it wherever, I guess. Or, I don't think Cam wants me to say this, but you can probably find it online, too. Like, sailing the seas type find it online. That's pretty tame on the scale of things you can find on the internet. Trust me."

His voice flattened at that last statement, but his real smile crept out for a bit before it saw its shadow and retreated.

"Yeah, I should mention. I guess you don't really have people on here plugging their ghostwriters. They want people to think they did it all themselves while campaigning around and reading speeches other people wrote. But I didn’t do it all myself. Cam Newton is prolific and I roped him into it. Uh, go buy his other stuff too. I think he's got one coming out with a house that has a demonic bathtub in it. Probably the protagonist almost gets hit by a minivan. I'm not joking, that's just his thing. And I’m pretty sure it's explained in the background of another book.”

The reporter tapped his chin. "We'll all be sure to check that out and make sure you have our support. Now is there any particular place you'd like to begin?"

"I'm just saying, seems a little imprudent on your end to cash in on the biggest media circus of the decade and-" He recalled the words he'd written, took a cutting. "You wrote yourself checks in my blood. Surely you'd leave me the tip? But I do want people to know, if they choose. I really do. Just, this doesn't go away for me, and maybe there's some way I can have at least a little security. What's the point of getting out if there's no life to live. But I'm not really in the mood to be judged right here."

Mark leaned in, voice soft and hands gesturing between them. "I think we’re all in agreement that what we know happened there was very difficult and there’s nothing at all that you should be ashamed of here."

"I said I don’t want to be judged." Nick blinked away the sudden hot moisture rimming his eyes. "Let everyone else do that on their own time. That's what this is for. At least let them all have the story before they come down this way or that. Which a lot of people have done already, of course, but this clearly isn't a perfect world."

"We know you were very driven to survive," the man said. Can you talk about what was waiting back home that you cherished so much?"

“Well, we all chose to survive. It just didn’t happen for most of us. I know that's a really popular trope, that whoever wants something bad enough gets it. And, well, when some people have swords or guns and some of us aren't as physically strong or just aren't lucky - like is it a bad thing if a highschooler isn't paranoid enough? But the people in charge said at least one of us had to die every day, or we all would. And maybe, like I said, this isn't a perfect world, and we didn't just come together and draw straws while we waited for someone to find us. Either way it's not just a question of wanting or not wanting to survive."

He lay watching the sun set, begging to see it rise again. A face hovered vefore him, so warm and sincere, almost serene. Even as he put a .45 caliber bullet through her temple.

He shook his head again, the corners of his mouth twitching in spite of himself.

“I keep saying ‘we,’ don’t I? And 'us.' And it's really not. There's me, and you, and them."

The man in the suit fixed him with a questioning gaze. "Could you elaborate? It seems to me like you were all in that situation together. Who exactly do you mean by 'you' and 'them?'"

"Well, they’ve all got something in common I don’t. Someone murdered them, and that’s not something I’ve experienced. People tried, definitely. And some of them got pretty close."

"But you did have other things in common with many of your classmates? Some of the ones who weren't trying? Is there anything you'd like to say about anyone who helped you get through the hard times?"

"Is that what you're getting at?" Nick said. "'Hard times,' that's a nice way to say killing someone. I guess that's pretty unique for you. You talk to someone and they say, 'Well, the first person I killed…' But no, I don't want to talk about anyone in particular. Not positive or negative. And probably some people are going to be disappointed over that. Maybe even a few people I'd care about."

"So is there anything else you would like to say to the people you care about? Anything you'd like everyone watching today to know?"

Nick sighed. "You just wanna know what to think of me, don’t you? Maybe you don’t. People watching do. That’s what they came for. And it’s like, well, good for you. Now figure it out yourself. You want good guys and bad guys to root for? Like, you really think the world is divided into good and bad people, don’t you? There are people who do bad things, oh yeah. Like camp outside the houses of dead children and ask their moms if they’ve got anything to comment. Or keep a running count, when everyone-"

He shook his head.

"You didn’t even know, did you? You didn’t know. That everyone was dead already. We had the cameras and everything. Hard not to notice them. And we didn’t know either. They told me just before I shipped out-"

The building fire in his gut went suddenly cold. There was one scene that hadn't made it into the book laying on the table. The big man himself sitting by his hospital bed, holding a katana cracked like a kitchen knife gone through the garbage disposal, the words "next time" hanging in front of his grinning face.

"I don't know where it was they were putting me back together. Someone was handing down orders, because the doctors wouldn't say. I just know it was far enough—and you all know the island itself was somewhere around Japan, but that's not a finger I really want to point—far enough that they gave me a little warning before they scooped me up and took me back."

The reporter leaned in, pausing a moment to navigate the sudden veering of the subject. He opened his mouth, but Nick preempted him.

"I'm sorry," he said, laying his hand on the cover of the book. "I think this probably isn't really going where we'd like... Can I just read this bit instead? Right at the beginning, addressed directly to the reader. I was going to from the start, but I thought maybe it was a bit of a copout. But I did write it pretty carefully, and I think that it at least says exactly what I want it to."

"Go ahead," Mark gestured, and smiled.

Nick nodded and leaned back in his chair. "This is an account of the thirty-eight students from Colehurst Secondary School’s class of 2013," he began without lifting the cover of the book.

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Quick thanks to Murderweasel for some line-item edits and helping me stitch together a few of these sections. This concludes the preview of SC1 Epilogue. Expect the rest Soon™. And in the meantime, have a fun SC2!~