[[Hayley Kelly continued from
Everyday is like Sunday]]
Charlene Norris was dead. Presumably. Not like there was an announcement or anything, quite yet, not like Hayley'd seen her die. But she'd seen the blood. It would be enough.
Hayley was somewhat happy about this. Not as happy as she'd like to be, but hell, the alternative was...she wasn't gonna think about the alternative. The alternative, really, would've been to let Charlene run off and to have gone on their merry way being best friends and toasting marshmallows or whatever stupid shit best friends were supposed to do. She could've done that. Charlene had been running. But what would that have done? She'd have friends, they could've come back later, could've killed them all, maybe, probably, yeah, right? Totally. Hayley absolutely refused to remember the situation as anything but
I shot her because we'd be in trouble otherwise.
Also Charlene Norris was a stupid bitch who deserved to die. This was almost besides the point.
But now they were running, which was really high up there on the list of Hayley Kelly's Least Favorite Things, along with stressful moments without cigarettes and beaches, two things which were also obnoxiously present in her life right now. This was really shaping up to be a shitty day, especially if Jay refused to do the cool thing and slow the fuck down. Weren't smokers supposed to have, like, no lung capacity? Shouldn't he be gasping for breath and shit? cause Hayley sure was, and it sucked, but she absolutely refused to let the boy out of her sight. Soon as he was gone, he was gone for good. Nature of the game. That's how she'd lost Maddy and Alex and she sure as fuck wasn't gonna let Jay Holland go out the same way.
She burst past the tree line, Ema close behind, hot on Jay's trail, even as the hot sand burned her bare feet, god she hated sand, god she hated the beach, hated everything about it, didn't she keep promising herself she wouldn't be back? Every time she came back, someone ended up dead, someone ended up miserable, and Hayley ended up freaking out over something and with sand in places where sand shouldn't be. Why did people come to the beach again?
She would've complained but she was kind of busy trying not to fall, trying to catch- did he just fall? Damn, boy was clumsy, least she could catch up with him now, silver lining on a cloud of bullshit. She kept running, looking up for the first time, away from Jay, making sure th
Boat.
Boat.
B-O-A-T. Spells boat. That was that thing that was sitting in the water. Being all...boaty and shit.
Holy fuckballs, Batman.
She couldn't blame Jay for hitting the ground, not as she stumbled over to Jay and Janet, utterly in shock. A boat. What the fuck did it mean? There couldn't be boats here, this island was supposed to be cut off from the universe. It was like Survivor, but with murder, and Survivor wasn't really cut off from the world anyway so that was a shit analogy. It was supposed to be, like...just untouchable. So who the fuck got here on boat?
Danya's men. That was her first thought, probably because she was paranoid as balls and because the only alternative seemed so unlikely. But no one was storming the beach. No one was shooting. The boat was just...sitting there. Being a boat. On the shores of Survival of the Fittest, where no boat could be. And what would Danya send a boat for, anyway? Why the hell...what would be the point? There wouldn't be. But the alternative was impossible. So impossible. It really just...it couldn't...
"Good morning, death island."
Hayley jumped about a foot. There was a voice, a loud-as-shit voice, and for once it wasn't coming from a loudspeaker and it wasn't the voice of Danya. It was coming from the boat, and she was all ears. This was going to be either very good or very bad and it very, very quickly revealed which it was.
"We're here with your friendly taxi service, offering an all-expenses-paid trip back to the good ol' USA-"
Her brain, likely in an attempt to save her for at least a moment, to give her a few seconds of joy, the last she was likely to have- or maybe more cynically, to completely secure its own future self-destruction- canceled out the second half of that sentence. Instead it gave her visions of things so far out of reach but for exactly three more seconds, oh-so-close.
Home.
Escape. That was the word she'd been avoiding like the plague,
escape. So impossible. So unreal. You did not escape from Survival of the Fittest. You went home either in a body bag or, if you were really lucky, with some major PTSD and a kill count that would make Jack the Ripper feel inadequate. Those were your options and Hayley'd always thought it was stupid to dream for anything better. All it would get you was killed by someone who knew the truth, knew how to play and knew they'd rather be a killer than dead. That was why Maddy and Alex were gone, right? Maddy was too good to kill, Alex too good to let anyone else get hurt. They both dreamed of escape, and Hayley had practically laughed at them. And now they were dead, and she was here, and so was the boat.
So much for impossibility.
There was a tinge of resentment there in Hayley's immediate thoughts. Resentment towards these mystery rescuers who chose now of all times to arrive. Now, when Alex Campbell, the last person left on this island who she'd always consider an absolute good- he'd died less than 24 hours ago. The boy who dreamed of escape, and of a way that everyone could go home and live in peace, he was dead now and no rescue boat was gonna save him. Okay, it takes time to get a rescue effort together, okay, this was probably
hell to work out. And okay, she couldn't really blame them. Resent them a tiny bit, privately, sure. Hell, she'd resent them for not showing for a week ago, before her boyfriend was dead. She'd resent them for not taking them all out of this hellhole before they'd even had the chance to start killing each other.
But those were just bitter, Survival of the Fittest-survivor thoughts. They would pass. She'd miss Alex and Maddy and Kyle forever, but the hate would pass. The anger would pass. All this negativity.
She had home to change that. Or she would, if her three seconds of happy denial weren't just about up.
"Killers, players, and cannibals welcome too, for the bullet-in-the-head special, if you want the easy way out of this."
...Oh.
Hayley heard the rest of what he said, sort of. Something about Happy Meals and a list of sociopaths. Something like that.
Killers, players, and cannibals. That just kept echoing around her head for a while. Bullet-in-the-head special. Extreme lead poisoning. Death. A list. A list of killers, he had a list of killers and if they tried to get on the boat, tried to escape, tried to go home-
Boom.
It was like she was setting an all-time speed record for the five stages of grief.
I...n-no, okay. Okay, so they're not letting certain people on the boat, they don't mean me, right? I mean, I'm a good person, sort of. I mean I've got kinda a lax sense of morality but that's...I'm just a teenager, a selfish teenager, and I just didn't know what else to do. Right? I mean...I'm not Maxwell Lombardi. I'm not a monster. They...they'll let me on. Have to let me on. I want to go home, I just want to go home...they...
...They can't just judge us like that. They can't. They can't just say "oh you killed someone okay now you're stuck on the goddamn Isle de Muerta, have fun with that," who the fuck are they to make that call? It's like...like they stuck a bunch of soldiers in a war and then wouldn't let them on the plane home cause they killed people. It's not like they had a fucking choice. Fuck, fuck, what do they think they'd do if they were stuck on this island?! Sit around and wait to be rescued? Maybe some people did that, but I'm not a fucking idiot, so I decided to actually try...maybe if these fuckers had showed up on time...
What can I do, though? Think they're gonna go for the whole "didn't think there was gonna be any other way out of this" excuse? I mean...there is a way out of this. On that fucking boat. God, there has to be some way I can convince them I deserve this. If I could just get home...I know I've been pretty fucking awful here but it's the game, I'll change...fuck, I can change, I can, I just need a chance...
But it won't work. They've already got their minds made up, haven't they? They've decided. They put me on a list with fucking Maxwell and fucking Brook and fucking Reiko and none of us are getting on that boat. They're leaving us to die. They want us to die. They think we deserve it. Death penalty without trial.
I...I'm not going home.
Hayley realized suddenly that she had not moved or in fact reacted at all, physically, to the announcement or to anything at all. She was still staring at the boat like it was a mirage on the horizon.
The first thing that came out of her mouth, like so many other things she'd vocalized lately, was strangled, choked, broken, a shadow of what it could been. It was a short burst of laughter. The closest thing she could get to speaking the truth.
She'd fought so fucking hard to go home and for that, she wasn't allowed to leave.
The irony would be delicious, if it wasn't going to kill her.
"Hah...ahah...well, that's new."
With something that might have been a grin, if only it had reached her eyes.
"Well, Jay? Looks like you're gonna see that video after all."