Dude Descending a Staircase

[Brackie]

((Oliver Davies continued from Running Up That Hill))

It had been a long fucking night for Oliver.

As he scrambled through the first open door of a two-storey house he could see, he contemplated just how far he'd gone around this entire peninsula today. He woke up on the beach after being knocked out by two randoms he could barely even remember the names of he was so tired, he hid until nightfall, he followed Virgil through the markets, he killed Victoria, he shot a stove, he found a house to plan his way forward in, he tried to kill the Head Girl, and then he ran from a swarm of wasps until he was panting and prone in a doorway. It was still dark. There were still untold horrors lurking about, be it other classmates who'd ascended to the role of mass murderer through the night, or the wasps who'd somehow gotten a taste of his blood and were ready to hunt him down until the end of his days. Either way, neither of them could get through a locked door, so in a move that had become somewhat mechanical by now, he pulled himself from the floor despite how tight his chest was, walked to the doorway, and closed and locked it behind him.

The rest was routine; his exhaustion pushed aside for his own survival, he checked every exit, every window, and locked or blocked them all on the bottom floor, making sure nobody was hiding along the way and he wasn't suddenly trapped in Broadmoor with whoever they could have been. Once that was done, he did the same with the second floor. Bedrooms and a small bathroom were the only rooms available for stay, so he made sure there was no secret attic or roomy cupboard to get ganked from. Nobody else was there. Oliver blocked all the windows to make the house look truly abandoned from the outside.

Once he blocked the window of the largest bedroom, he shed his vest to the floor and collapsed upon the bedding, and without even putting away his gun, securing the room, or thinking further about the long day he'd had, he immediately fell asleep.

--

Oliver was woken up by the pain in his back.

It wasn't pain like the gash in his head, or the splinters in his hand, but the feeling of having slept wrong. The mattress wasn't exactly luxury, it was probably old and had who even knew how many people sleeping on it over the years, especially in a place like this. You couldn't exactly go down to the store and buy a new one, and that was before this was a death game. His back felt contorted, like the mattress had slipped into the wrong position and snagged him along the way. Rubbing the worst part, he began to get up and saw it was beginning to look like daytime through the cracks at the bottom of the curtain blocking the window.

He also noticed he'd left the door open. Near immediately, he hobbled over with his hand still on his back and slammed it shut, falling against it as he did so. He slid to the ground, trying to recall a time he'd been so reckless. Sure, the entire house was secure from top to bottom, but who could have known if someone had decided to open the front door via grenade launcher or snuck in through a hole in the roof that could have led straight to him. It was a stupid move on his part.

Oliver stayed splattered across the floor as his back to the door eventually turned into a back on the ground. It still hurt, so he kept it straight, this time vertically. He was still tired, so he closed his eyes momentarily, and felt the sleep attempt to rush up to meet him. When he opened them again, he was met with a strange nostalgic sensation, one he'd felt slightly when he woke up just under a minute ago.

The other two times he woke up here weren't in the best places; one was in the middle of a dumpster, the other was on a beach after suffering a concussion and going about it completely the wrong way. His hands were still slightly red and netted from that second part. The third time was different, and it carried with it something familiar.

For a fleeting moment, he thought he'd woken up at home.

Oliver had been here almost two days and he had barely thought about his parents and his sister and his friends, at least nothing beyond the surface. He wondered if that was because he didn't have time, being so ready to enact the plan that would save the world. He also wondered if there was another reason, like the thought of even thinking about getting to go home to them again would cause him to spin out and abandon everything, when he and his country literally couldn't afford that in the face of total annihilation from military tyranny.

But it was too late now, because he was thinking about the last time he got to hang out with his friends, and how two of them almost ended up in a punch-up after one of them accused the other of stealing his girlfriend. He thought about the last time he spoke with his parents, his dad making some snide remark to his mum about the Labor party, his mum blissfully unaware of the venom as she watched TV with a bowl of cereal in her hands. It all created a weightless sensation inside his own body. And the moment it came crashing back down was when he thought about his sister.

His last interaction with Ellie had been her texting him about dropping her off at the shopping centre that afternoon and him telling her he had football practice so he was going to have to find another way, and she called him a loser virgin, but in nastier words. Wasn't exactly indicative of their entire relationship, but not a lot of their interactions were to an outsider. They were close siblings, despite what outside sources would say to the contrary - there was a lot of things you shared only with the person born eighteen months after yourself, a lot of information you trusted to that person. It went both ways, obviously, because Oliver had more than once woken up in the middle of the night to pick Ellie up from a location that she really should not have been for her age, and once he even sideswiped someone's mirror off of their car with his own at her beheast after learning what had transpired that night.

And the reason he was stuck on Ellie was because if all of this had happened a year later, with everything remaining the same, there was just as good a chance that she would have been the one to end up here instead of him.

The thought first amused him. He couldn't imagine Ellie dealing well with being in a giant dumpster, let alone having to deal with a twat like Samuel. But then the amusement faded away when he realized he wouldn't be there - in the worst case scenario, he and his friends and his parents would be dead because the Americans had stepped onto their homeland. In the best case scenario, they'd be safe at home without her and trying to figure out if they'd ever see their daughter or sister again. Oliver would probably have given anything to see her again, just one last time, even if it was just to make sure that their last interaction ever wasn't her calling him a loser virgin, again in different words.

That was probably the one thing that gave him pause - Oliver would have given literally anything to get Ellie back if she were here. Odds were, she was back home, alive, with mom and dad, thinking the exact same thing. But he wasn't coming back. He didn't know how many people were left, so he didn't know his exact odds, but they weren't the best. And even besides that, when he won...well, more like if he won at this point, in this scenario that existed inside his head, he was immediately going to put one of his guns to his heads and shoot himself, to make sure that home wasn't distracted enough by an errant survivor that needed interviewing and grilling to launch the biggest counterattack in their military history.

But that didn't stop him from thinking about what it'd be like to actually go home. He wasn't going home, but he liked to think.

He wondered if he'd done enough.

--

As Oliver stared at the ceiling, he noticed that his back had stopped hurting as much. He began to pull himself from the ground, getting a hand on the varnished bedframe at his feet. Sitting momentarily on the end, he looked at the door. Then, without word, stood up, walked forward, opened the door, and went into the upstairs hallway.

It was empty, of course. The bedroom and bathrooms doors were all shut, as they'd been left, and he could see downstairs to the front from where he stood, and it was still locked and closed. The house was still secure.

Oliver walked to the top of the stairs, and rather than descending them, he sat down. His arse on the landing, his feet two stairs down.

He'd shot three people since he'd been here. He'd attempted to shoot one more, and used his gun to destroy someone else's stove. Of the people he'd engaged with in that way, two of them had attacked him first, Anvi and Victoria. One of them had been Phoebe, a move he'd told himself beforehand he needed to do if he wanted to make it through the end, and it didn't feel right all the way through, which didn't even take into account how that whole scene ended. Another was Virgil's stove, but that crime was victimless - if Virgil really would starve without a stove, then he could pilfer one off of Victoria's corpse, like something anyone else here would do. The last one was Samuel, and in the grand scheme of things it didn't make sense, if only because it didn't add up, at least if he only took into account what he'd been saying since the start.

He'd shot Samuel with the intention of keeping him still as he explained his plan, and then left him to bleed to death, which of course did not come to pass. It didn't add up because of how he'd said right after he shot Samuel that he didn't do it because Samuel was annoying him or was rude to him. It didn't add up because the two other people he'd shot were shot because they were attacking him, and Samuel hadn't done anything.

Thinking back, it would have been so easy to just disappear into the darkness and never come back. Oliver would probably have still run into Anvi, albeit with less supplies, but then Oliver could have just stolen Anvi's. Everything would have gone exactly the same, only Samuel could have still been alive, possibly. He didn't know what Samuel did after he left the other boy for dead - for all Oliver knew, the exact same events could have transpired, and Victoria would have still shot Samuel. There was a distinct possibility that nothing would have changed at all, the only difference being that Oliver hadn't shot Samuel in the leg.

So what was the actual reason he'd shot Samuel?

Was it actually because he was rude to him?

He'd said the opposite was true at the start, the moment Samuel fell to earth, but as he'd learned from reflection only a few hours before he attempted to kill Phoebe, he was beginning to trust his own words even less. There was a distinct possibility that he'd only put a bullet in Samuel's leg because he fucking hated Samuel, no matter what he said at the time to the contrary, even to himself. But Oliver couldn't figure out what it meant. Sure, lets entertain the possibility that the only reason he shot Samuel was because he hated Samuel. It meant that he was lying back then. That matched up, right? He was lying back then, he was lying to himself yesterday--

His eyes opened in alarm.

He'd lied to himself twice.

A smart person wasn't supposed to lie to himself so many times.

It was now becoming worrying. Twice was far too many times to be lying to one's self. He hadn't even realized how badly he'd been lying to himself until days later - if he lasted even longer out here, then what else was going to come out? Was it going to be revealed that he'd actually killed Anvi and Victoria completely unprompted? Were people actually saying completely different things to him than what he'd remembered?

What if, at the end of the day, he was lying to himself about the real reason he wanted to get to the end?

What if he'd just wanted to kill his classmates and this thing gave him the excuse to do so?

What if his entire plan was just a bunch of bullshit?

His breath began racing, prompted naught by the outside world. He'd centered himself so much on this smart, intelligent plan of his being an infalliable truth that he hadn't even processed the possibility that he could be deluding himself to such an extent. All along, he'd been convinced that the only truth in his world was the fact that the only way he could help home was to make sure nobody left this peninsula alive, when he was now doubting the very foundation of his limited existence.

What if he wasn't so smart after all, and this entire time he'd just made up an excuse to kill his classmates when prompted and then chalk it up to his plan, and when he got to the end and won, he wasn't even going to go through with it? What if, after all this time, he was going to be the quisling that Samuel sneered at back in the opening hours?

And what if all of that was true and he didn't even know it? What if no matter what he told himself from this point forward, he was still going to get to the end and use the opportunity to go home and see his sister and his parents and his friends again, instead of doing the one thing he'd been basing every conscious decision on for the past day?

What he'd killed two of his classmates because he was no better than the worst of them?

--

After all that, the only thing left in the house was a teenage boy sitting at the top of the stairs, eyes and breath stricken in panic.

Several minutes later, without any thought of a word, he got up from his seat, walked to the room he'd slept in, and shut the door behind him.

--

His bag was carefully hidden. In it was the gun he stole from Victoria, the vest, what remained of his food, and all the ammo for both weapons. The only thing Oliver had was the gun he'd been given on the first day, and a single round chambered.

The first thing he'd done upon returning to the room was scream into the bedding, which had the sensory texture of the dump from when he was that close to it. He couldn't figure out his own mind, and it was terrifying. He could no longer trust what he'd been telling himself from the outset, because he wasn't sure if he was lying his face off to save himself the guilt of being no better, no more rational, or worse even no more intelligent, than the people who'd killed completely unprompted here. All this time he'd thought he had a reason for doing everything when there was a very real chance he was no better than a common caveman.

So he decided to test himself.

Russian Roulette.

At the end of the day, when he got to the end, he was going to have to kill himself somehow. The quickest and easiest way was going to have to be the magnum. One bullet, straight through the skull, and the rest was a worry for someone else. It was as inevitable as the sun setting or the ocean moving.

Oliver needed to test the inevitability.

He hid his things, he removed all bullets from the chamber except one, and sat on the bed. In a quick movement, he spun the chamber several times, each time progressively harsher than the one before. He knew this didn't affect the odds, didn't make him more likely to live when this was all over. It gave him a sense of control over what was essentially fate, and that was it. He eventually stopped spinning, and sat the gun on his lap.

He was fucking terrified. But he was supposed to be. For as distant and clinical as he'd been about the inevitability of having to blow his own head off to help his country, the concept of it actually happening still drew his nerves over the rack.

The only positive he could think of that would ease the anticipation was that...well, if he failed, then he no longer had to worry about anything ever again.

Oliver raised the gun to his head.

He took a deep breath, and snaked his finger through to the trigger.

He took another deep breath.

Another.

And another.

And another, and he pulled, and--

A click.

His next breath was nothing but exhale. His relief was palpable.

But he knew it wasn't enough.

One in six odds wasn't close enough to six in six, which is what they were going to be if he followed his word.

So Oliver raised the gun to his head again. Now it was one in five.

He took another breath.

And out.

Another breath.

He finger returned to the trigger.

And out.

He kept on taking breaths, and he became vividly aware of his hand shaking.

Another breath.

He felt his throat tighten as he tried to take in oxygen.

This wasn't helping at all.

It should have just been enough that he could tell himself he'd do it. Why shouldn't it have been enough? He'd been so truthful up until this-

Oliver pulled the trigger.

Another click.

The gun dropped to the floor and Oliver's exhalation resembled that of a sob. But nothing more.

When he fell to the ground to follow the gun, his vomiting was different from the vomiting he suffered as a result of his concussion. The food he'd eaten after killing Victoria agreed with him at the time, but it didn't account for the owner suddenly deciding he was going to have to test his own worthiness. He'd shot himself in the head twice, albeit with no bullets, just like he was going to have to do at the end of this whole thing if he wanted to follow through on everything. Oliver had proven to himself that he could do what he'd told himself he was going to do from the moment he made the decision.

And yet he didn't feel better at all.

What was going to make him feel better?

--

Glass flew.

--

Oliver sat in front of the shards of a broken mirror, as it had broken when he threw his gun at it. One of the shards was covered by the second wave of vomit, the one that hit him after he'd left the room and began throwing frames at walls and former belongings at windows. Some of them hadn't broken, but they'd certainly made a loud crash. If anyone was in the area, they'd certainly know someone was in a house, and after a few minutes of listening, they'd be able to figure out which one.

The inanimate violence made him feel better, but after everything he'd gone through he wasn't sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.

Just like he wasn't sure whether surviving two rounds of Russian Roulette with himself was a good thing or a bad thing.

Just like he wasn't sure whether the fact he'd been lying to himself was a good thing or a bad thing.

They were just things.

Oliver didn't know anything anymore. He'd clung to his mission as a liferaft and yet there could have been a motor underneath it all along propelling him into the wrong waters. So far all he'd been able to prove to himself was he could fight back when necessary, hunting down innocent people who feared him and were trying to escape was not in his wheelhouse, and when push came to shove, there was at least a chance he wasn't going to chicken out of his plan if he did end up winning.

He got up from the ground, retreiving his gun along the way.

Those weren't exactly the worst things to be able to prove, all things considered.

He retreived his bag from its hiding place, and placed the gun inside without checking to see where the bullet was.

Oliver was a smart guy, even if this entire plan had been flawed from the go and he was only just realizing it now. The only real way forward, the only way to really keep following this, was to start telling the truth to himself, and stop labouring under the illusion that he would always operate under infalliable logic. There was always the chance this entire plan, or even his own mind, was crazy, but for now he had to operating under the assumption that it wasn't. The plan was still to make it to the end, win, and then kill himself to bring the full force of a UK counter-attack down upon the heads of every American who had ruined the world, and he could recognize it didn't start from the most intelligent analytical perspective. But if he was going to bake himself into it, Oliver needed to be honest to Oliver. He needed to do what Oliver would do operating under that plan, and not a step out of sync. It wasn't the smartest move, or the most strategic move. But keeping in line with his own self was the only way he could stay in line with the plan, at the end of the day.

He lay back down on the bed. The door was closed again, a small cabinet having been moved in front of it. His bag was open at the end. Victoria's gun, now his gun, lay beside him, safety on but fully loaded. HIs first gun was still in the bag, his food still wrapped and ready to be eaten when he woke up again in a few hours, and the rest of his survival gear relatively untouched.

His bag, and his plan?

It was really all he had.

((Oliver Davies continued elsewhere))