CQD Ward

[Pippi]

Okay, so. This sucked. This sucked a lot. JB wasn’t gonna pretend for a second that this wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened to him, because, c’mon, what could be worse? This was the real actual Program that he’d found himself trapped in! Only one person got out of here alive! You didn’t need to be a maths genius (and considering JB had fallen asleep 17 times in his maths classes (he’d counted) he certainly wasn’t one) to figure out that the probability of that one person being him wasn’t very high!

Even then, what happened to the person who ‘won’ this whole thing? Nobody knew! They just kinda… vanished off the face of the Earth. Maybe they were given a new name and a nice, cushy role in the military for being the best dang patriot that ever patrioted. Maybe they were enrolled into a super-soldier program and given Ultra Power Drugs so they could breathe in space and fight off the evil bad guy aliens!

Or maybe, once they were picked up as the last kid remaining, they were shot in the back of the head and dumped with the rest of the bodies.

…

Okay, wow, that wasn’t a cool thought at all, pretend that one had never happened!

So, yeah, this was a dumpster fire of a situation. JB had cried already (just a little bit, nothing the cameras would have picked up), he had paced and muttered and raged, he had realised just how boned he truly was.

But, c’mon. The knife he was holding? Super badass.

JB had a familiar grin on his face as he trekked his way through the salvage yard, occasionally swinging the parachute knife through the air in front of him, or shadow boxing whilst dancing around on his toes. As soon as he’d picked his weapon up, he’d come to a decision. He wasn’t gonna let this place dictate how he was feeling. People didn’t wanna see JB the Downcast Worrywart. They wanted to see JB the, well… JB! He wanted to stay as peppy and upbeat for as long as he could, because that was who he was! That was who he was. He didn’t wanna lose himself.

And maybe if he stayed positive, everything might even turn out all right.

For now, he was happy to just wander around the scrapheap and fight imaginary bad guys. This place was freaking cool. There was so much abandoned stuff here! There was the usual things, like old beds and chairs and a bath tub here and there, but around every corner there was something new. A rusted out old pick-up truck! A dinghy with a massive hole in the side! A huge yellow shipping container that looked like a sinking ship! It was like something from a film. Here was JB, the hero, fighting his way through a crowd of evil soldiers, trying to get revenge on the tyrannical General! Swish! There went someone’s arm! Ka-bam! Punch to the face! Stab! Hole in your guts!

The only downside was that the place reeked of fish, and if that was the only downside, he was doing pretty a-okay.

JB stabbed the knife into The General’s dumb neck and whistled to himself.

[Slam]

There was a small sound as some debris shifted.

It was a whisper compared to Nellie's wailing scream,

as she ran at JB, brandishing a shoehorn.

[Pippi]

Turns out, JB should have been looking out for the very real enemies scattered around the town, rather than the fake bad guys he was stabbing and punching.

Truth was, he was trying not to think about the prospect that there might be people he shared classes with and ate lunch with who, right this moment, were plotting to shoot their way to victory. Maybe if he willed it hard enough, it wouldn’t happen! Yeah! They could be the very first class selected for the Program who managed to get out of this with everybody alive! They were all a super tightknit group, weren’t they? All friends and stuff? Yeah! The only people they’d have to hurt would be those

And so JB had continued on his merry way, utterly oblivious to his surroundings.

To be fair, it probably wouldn’t have helped much if he was. For one, Nellie had made her decision to launch herself at JB after running directly in front of him. It would have been hard for pretty much anybody to have missed that. For another, the sight of Nellie screaming like a banshee, eyes wide, wielding a plastic shoehorn of all things, that was something that would have taken anybody by surprise. Not just JB. Small comfort though it was, he was totally justified in not reacting in anyway. Totally.

JB froze as Nellie descended upon him. He didn’t even manage to drop his smile as she smashed the shoehorn into his face and a blinding flash of light exploded in his brain.

It was an eye risk manoeuvre for Nellie, but it paid off. Keep this up, and she’d be a visionary in the field of murder. If only one could see inside her head, see what makes her pop, tick. Some might say she had a bit of nerve, ending JB’s life like that, but if you could just look on the bright side; there were cornea ways to go. It was truly a pity there was no-one around to lens him a hand, though.

If JB’d had time to think of any regrets, he’d probably put the fact that he never got a chance to make those puns pretty high up the list.

JB BLACKWELL: DECEASED

[Slam]

As Nellie finally stopped screaming, long after JB had died, she looked down at the face beneath her. Lifeless. Empty. Defeated.

She pulled at the shoehorn, but it snapped in half, leaving a jagged piece of plastic lodged through JB’s eye socket, into his brain. She looked at the broken piece in her hand. Threw it away in frustration.

She was breathing heavily, but she was still alive. She stood up, JB between her feet, looking down at him a moment longer. She looked down at herself, remarkably clean for having just committed a murder. Her cream sweater didn’t have nearly as much blood on it as she thought it would.

A moment later, she stepped off of him. Went over to the knife he’d dropped, picked it up.

Heh. Level up.

The thought made her smile, so she did. It was a wide, giddy smile, that seemed to stretch further than it should have been able to. That hadn’t been as hard as she’d thought it would be.

If the rest were like this, then maybe she didn’t have to be pissing herself. All it took was giving it her all, and she’d come out the victor, and even gotten a present for it. This was all it took.

This was easy.

She looked down at JB again. Kicked him for good measure. Sorry dick, Nellie’s still around.

One down, a class worth to go.

((Nellie Fitzpatrick continued in Didn't Think This Through))