Guns, Germs, and Rust

[randomness]

(G040 – Amanda Tan - Start)

Amanda had woken up to find herself lying in a puddle.

Remembering where she was, she sat up with a shock, bumping her head on the corner of a table. She swore softly, spending a few long moments to reorient herself to her new situation. She was soaked, she was in a cold, dark room, the air was dead and she was stuck in some sort of murderous death game. One of these things felt a lot more pressing than the others.

Even in the dim light, she could see what she had bumped into wasn't a regular table, it was some kind of operating table with a metal tool cart nearby. There were piles of junk everywhere too, splintering wood that looked like they might have once been chairs, dozens of unmarked boxes and a pile of neatly folded straight jackets in a corner, as if waking up in a dark operating theatre wasn't creepy enough. Amanda was hesitant to search any more, given that she was unlikely to find anything in the dark.

She should have been freaking out. She should have been scared, or something. But she wasn't mostly fine, only unnerved and Amanda could only feel an unusual sense of guilt about that. Perhaps she was in shock and her mind didn't understand, couldn't understand how ridiculous of a situation she was in. Even if she was in some kind of weird storage room, for some kind of mental facility, it still didn't feel like they were on some kind of mysterious murder island.

But three things in the room that confirmed that the abductions weren't a fever dream. The small beeping light of the camera in the corner of the room tracking her movements was one. The second was the sling bag that had been placed beside her when she awoke, saving her from needing to search too hard for it. The third object though was perhaps the most obvious and the most important. A rifle lay near the bag on the table, the tag attached to it declaring it to be a FN 1949, whatever that was. Amanda knew nothing about guns. She'd seen them for sure, it wasn't as if they were rare in Kingman, but she didn't shoot herself. Her parents were always of the opinion that gun culture was dumb and Amanda had largely agreed. Nobody needed a gun for self defense.

Not normally at least. Normally people shooting each other wasn't a daily incident and having a gun probably wouldn't save you from that. Here though the rules were different. People would be shooting. People would be dying. Amanda understood that much. And Amanda wasn't keen on dying. She wasn't keen on pulling the trigger either, but she would definitely be very upset if she were to die. Would she dare shoot someone? Amanda didn't know. Amanda didn't want to know.

Amanda had never really thought hard about herself before. Each time teachers would give them all these character-building sheets and job prospect things and god knows how much rubbish and Amanda never really knew what to write for them. Strengths? Weaknesses? She obviously had them but all she could write on the sheet were one-word answers that seemed like things that people might say about her but were not quite anything she really felt she had anything to do with.

Was she going to play? Was she capable of playing? A million questions hung in the air, all of them unanswered, and as Amanda left the room, she was more unsure of where she was going as when she had woken up.

((Amanda Tan continued in You Could Have A Dream About Losing Your Friends))