Penultimate Questions

[Anderson]

[Slightly preemptive, but I've got somewhere I want to go with this and I don't want to get nailed to a timetable]

[Sean Davidson continued from Lost in the Woods]

Sean sat down in something of a daze.  Every factor had been adding up (physical, emotional...it didn't matter.  They were all adding up, compounding eachother...

Dead.  They're all dead.

He'd actually stopped keeping track of whose names he'd heard over the loudspeakers...but one by one, he was hearing the names of people he knew, all dead.  There was no point in tracking how they'd died: Such only went to remind Sean of just how nasty the end could be when it came searching for you.  Even sitting, drinking the second part of a bottle of water, the reality of the show weighed down on him like so many steel beams: There was really no way to recharge, to get more energy to keep going, when you'd already been through roughly two days of hell that could even invade your dreams and that kept you from getting any real sleep.

Of course, a second little bit had not failed to escape his notice: There were, for all intents and purposes, two people in the running for the ten-kill ticket home.  One was a girl whose name he'd never heard before this week...

Not going to try and find here...Karen Whois?  Something like that?  Nope.

...but the other was someone he did know, someone he'd run into in the lunchroom at school and who'd helped him out with betting and so forth.  Someone he'd accidentally pissed off earlier, but someone he knew all the same.  Someone who might just be worth saving.

Zach.  You've got a good chance of getting out of here.

============================

It took Sean a while to get up the courage, to settle on a course of action.  He could do the numbers...

I'm not a killer.  Besides, I got a damn super-soaker.  What am I supposed to do?  Shoot someone with acid with it or something?  No.  That's not who I am.  That's not who I'll ever be...

...and he knew how this show would end for him.  One way or another, he wasn't getting off of the show alive.  As the wheels turned in his mind, that eliminated a lot of options, but it opened another one up.  In all of his watching, he'd never seen anyone actually try to get a player off the show with their ten kills.  The players always did it themselves, and sometimes seemed to do so effortlessly.  But between the cold math that he did in his mind and the simple reality that he would not, in fact, be going home, Sean settled on what he needed to do.

I'll give Zach all the help I can.  It's the least I can do for him.

With that conclusion, Sean packed up his bag and started off, searching out the closest thing he had to a friend on the island.

Where are you, Zach?  Where are you going?  And where can I find you?

[Sean Davidson continued in Drowning in a Glass Half Empty]