Looking for yourself out there

Almost 23:23. Awesome. Uh. Honestly, I'm not too sure why I'm posting. It's... a gorgeous night out; snuck out of my tent again to sleep under the stars. Man. It's amazing out here.

You... have to wonder. Because of the way light travels, any other those stars could be dead at this very second, but they're alive to us, alive and shining and more... there than we can ever know. Stars! Constantly dying and being reborn and we don't even know it. We don't know... much of anything, do we?

In this context... it's scary. As people, we want to leave our impact. Somewhere, someone could be looking at something glowing and it's Earth, and it's shining despite being long, long gone. And nobody knows it's gone; it's just....

But isn't that testament enough? All the tragedy and awesomeness and heartbreak and joy and sadness. Everything. Because the world wouldn't be the way it is without it, right? I say don't worry about leaving your mark. Do something that matters today, because somehow, somewhere, someone will remember you.

Look at me, I sound like Walter or something XD. Aw well. I think I'll head back to camp before I encounter some kind of toothed carnivore, ahaha. Goodnight, everyone. I'll post again in the morning.

Happy Trails (And sleep well!),

Zachariah Lewis

I'm fine.

And you all left off on such a desperate note, I'm fine.

just

not really feeling like myself anymore.

but I'm still typing, right?

that show's I'm fine

pleaseohgodi'mshowingthemi'mfine

they're all dead

zach is with me though

still in the trees, not sure why we tried to leave

its nice here

reallynicehere

with all the blood and stuff

sometimes i can pretend, youknow

that this never happened

not sure what it means

probably more pain

hope not

hope doesnt count for anything

nothing ever meant anything

we all didnt die for anything

imsorry

imsorryimsorryimsorry

we didnt want this

i didnt want this

idontwanttodie

i still have somuch to do

i

i

nononojsutalittlelonger

please

PLEASE

ican
Suzedidnt have to

richard.

elliott.

alex.





run.



just



run.

The forest's gearing up for something.

The air around us seems different. Charged. Almost. . . waiting?

I've heard whispers of rescue plans.

Suze has already voiced the general opinion on this matter. Good luck. If something could've been done it would have been done already. Couriers have tried. That's what Harper tells me, anyways.

Can you believe I actually listen to the bastard? No wonder Suze thinks I'm a deserter.

She's not dead, by the way. So that's always a good thing. One less body to add to the smoulder pit at center camp. She's here and Richard's back, too. Got screwed up pretty badly by Collector by the looks of it. That's what he tells me, anyways.

A flash of red, he says. We see them around a lot. /I/ see them around a lot. A blur of crimson. A spark of what looks like fire, so intense that it sends a painful shot straight to your head and leaves you with an perfect shade of its former self, now teal and gray, exactly where you saw it.

Sometimes, it has eyes. If you're lucky, teeth. A grin a mile wide.

I call him Cheshire.

Camp calls me crazy.

Actually, traitor's the word that's on their lips most of the time. Traitor. Deserter. Back-stabber. They cycle through them. All because I want to play a tune or two every now and then. Or maybe it's because I've been wandering the forest every so often. This place really isn't too bad once you get used to it.

Not like it's safe to go out there. I mean, it was never safe. Just stable. Wander too long and you'd never see camp again. Sometimes I wonder if there's anybody left. The ones who wandered off, I mean. Sometimes I look for them when I'm out there. Listening for something, /anything/, that would tell me that somebody other than the seven of us and our resident 'caretakers' (and I use that word very, /very/ lightly) out there.

I've been unsuccessful. I'm even pretty sure that Cheshire's just a figment of our collective imagination.

But it's nice to pretend.

It's About Time.

Is there no better way to end a two month silence than with a cluster f-bomb? I think not. 


Previously in Class 123, people died. Shocking, huh? That's a plot twist to end all fucking plot twists. Next thing you know we'll wander in circles and somebody will run off screaming into the bushes.

Actually, wait. That already happened, didn't it? It was Chase. What a damn shame. 


Yeah, definitely bitter. If I wasn't before I sure as hell am now.

Rest in peace, buddy. Half of us wouldn't be here without you. Not that half counts for much where I can list off the remaining kids around camp on both of my hands. Me. Richard. Lyle. Alex, and a handful of others - though Alex isn't really Alex anymore. Poor bastard stopped responding to his own name a little while ago. Started talking about seeing Zach around camp and keeps notes on his arms about what the hell is going on here - which, all things considered, isn't much. At least bitch and Slenderfucker have graciously left us to die in what little dignity we have left, even if that traitor Broodmoor is still sneaking out every few night to play a song or two with the bastard.

Fuck I don't think I've ever needed a drink so bad in my fucking life.

Calm, Suze, caaaalm...


...



Alright. I think I'm going to be okay now. A few trees are now sans branches but what the hell, we've got thousands. Knowing this place they'll be bigger and fuller by the time we wake up tomorrow. Or what we think is tomorrow. Fucked if I know because the sun stopped setting a long, long time ago and our phones stopped giving us the right time long before that. I stopped caring. It feels like it's only been a couple weeks and suddenly all I hear around camp is two months, two months like we're in The Grudge or some shit.

Though that would be a pleasant fucking surprise at this point. Death by creepy Japanese kid crawling out of my phone. I think I'd be okay with that. As long as I don't have to look at Tall, Dark and Faceless' ugly mug every time I shut my eyes.

Richard's gone.

... Yeah, I've got no transition for that.

Richard left a while ago. Broodmoor was smoking somewhere in center camp (where the hell did he get cigarettes?) and said he saw him wander off. When I asked him why the fuck he didn't stop him he just kind of shrugged and took a drag.

"So it goes."


Asshole. People are dropping off left and right but he can at least pretend to be upset, can't he?

Can't you?


Another one bites the dust, I guess. Richard Battles, you crazy, brave, idiotic, masterful jerkoff I hope to whatever gods that might still watch over this place you went down in the blaze of glory you wanted to.

I'm not a religious person. I'm just terrified. 


And as for the ones plotting that little rescue mission? Yeah, I've been around the blogs. Followed the comments. Can't post, but there are some workarounds. Turns out there is a type of proxy I don't feel guilty about associating with. 


Call me close-minded.

Your rescue mission? Not going to work. We've been here for four months and we can't get out. You expect to come in, guns blazing, rip us out of camp and drag us back home?

Good fucking luck. 


Really. If those couriers or whoever the fuck is responsible for giving us provisions for the last little while can barely get in, (and apparently get kicked right back out) what hope do you have? It didn't matter too when things went south in July, did it? Why the interest now? Just leave us to die. You'll only add to the pile of bodies and frankly, we don't have enough fuel left to burn the current ones with. We don't need any more blood on camp's ground and we definitely don't need You Know Who or his little hooded bitch on our case again. We're just a bunch of college kids who got in way, way over our heads. There isn't enough of us left to be worth saving.

Did you know that when an animal thinks it's going to die, it panics? But when it knows it's going to die...


Well. I'll leave you to puzzle that one for yourselves. I'm not as determined as Richard or as crazy as Lyle or as lost as Alex or as smart as Walter or as...broody as Broodmoor. I've had four months and plenty of examples of what happens when somebody stops fearing death and welcomes it with open arms. And after watching it happen 42 times?

It's my turn. 

Please

Oh god, someone help us, please.

But there's no god in this place anymore....

It's been almost two months but it's hard to tell what exactly is going on

when what happened

when we are right now.

Because you know what? Walter was right. Zach was right. Even fucking Collectorshit was right.

I suddenly have this feeling that everything was connected. It's like I could see the whole thing, one long chain of events that stretched all the way back before this all started, and I'm not going to live long enough to find out the truth. I feel like I can see everything that happened, and everything that is going to happen. It's  like a perfect pattern, laid out in front of me.


And I realised we're all part of it, and all trapped by it. 

Time doesn't mean anything when you know you're going to die.

Nobody answers our posts anymore. We don't have admin so we can't even see if people are checking the blog in their apparent bout of apathy. But I see you all. I see you all fawning over M and joking about Robert and cheering on Maduin. But M isn't going to help us, and Robert and the Jester...

None of you care.

I'm starting to wonder if you ever did; If anyone ever did in the first place, because what does it matter? As long as you're alive then why in hell's name should any of this bother you; you all have your friends, your "families", and outside of that, the rest of the world can burn.

I don't blame you.

I can't blame you.

All those times chasing chicks and laughing with Zach, working my ass off in high school and being annoyed with my parents; the trip to Italy and learning to fight from that weird pale guy, crying when I fucked up that one time in the school play and seeing my mum cry as I moved out of the house...

... I'm tired of surviving. I just want to live; I want to go home and take a shower and hit something and go to the mall. I want to eat fast food and see a movie and get in a fender-bender. I want to do graffiti and bomb a test and say goodnight to my little brother.


But I can't go back to that anymore.

If this even gets out, if you're reading this, I'm not going to have much time left. That's good, I've got that, but once you realize this, you don't last long in here. It makes you comfortable. Or maybe that's what I tell myself, what I want to believe in this nest of fucking lies and liars.

Because I'm more afraid than I ever had been in my life. I barely sleep anymore; I can feel Him watching me, appraising me like I'm a hunk of meat. I look around camp and I shake. And shake. And shake. I can't stop, We won't stop.

And every so often, someone stops shaking and walks into the trees. The first few, I'd plead with. I'd beg. Scream myself hoarse that they still had too much to do, had people waiting for them, but why would they listen?

It's obvious that nobody's come looking for us. We're the class the world forgot.

Then I turned to violence. Broke some limbs. But Chase isn't... around. And they only ended up dragging themselves out of camp while calmly stating that I'd have to kill them to keep them from going. Even when they screamed for mercy until it all went silent, we didn't follow them. We couldn't.

I don't try to save them anymore.

But maybe I stopped being afraid when Adel gave up. When Wallace, his partner to the end, went into the trees after him. He was shaking too, but it wasn't with terror; and when Lily started screaming and Ian stared into her eyes and told her he loved her since fifth grade and then slit her throat from ear to ear,

She was trying to run to Him. So it goes. And so he wasn't afraid, not anymore.

Heh, look at me. I sound like Lyle. I sound like Zach. Can you blame me?

Because in our lives, this hell, you find something else; you find something that matters more to you than life. They threaten to kill you unless you give them what they want, but you all tell them you'd rather die. You face the fact that this is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. You become calm. You become still. Maybe that's because you knew what was going on, maybe you knew what you were getting into.

But I didn't.  Twenty years old and I'm going to die because I wanted some extra credit.

It seems strange, seems foreign to type it out, see it so plainly written in this tiny word processor. To, as Walter would have put it, "Confront mortality; see it stretched out before you like a line in the sand, watching the tide of the end grow closer and closer".

He never said anything like that. I'm a fake. I've always been a fake. Trying to be brave for everyone, trying to give them all something to hate. At first I thought it was hate, too, how I would survive through this. Hate was all I knew, it built my world, it imprisoned me, taught me how to eat, how to drink, how to breathe. I thought I'd die with all my hate in my veins. But then something happened. It happened to me... just as it  will happen to all of you. 

... For four months, I've known that it was coming. I've apologized to no one and gotten no apologies in return; parts of me slowly dying, eaten by all my hate and then shutting up when I had nothing left; centimetre by centimetre.

12 by 9.

It's small, and it's grainy; it's a crappy screen on a crappy cellphone that spent way too much time hidden under a desk or in my pocket

And it's the only thing in this fucking place worth having. He's never going to take that from me.

Even if the Collector looks me in the eye as he stabs me in the heart, he'll never be able to take this away.

That's the only thing I can promise.

The only thing I have left.

And here's my last love letter; the last I'll ever write.

...I hope that whoever you are, you escape this mess. I hope that the worlds turns, and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that, even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or hug you,

I want you to live.

I want to live. I want to know that all of this wasn't for nothing, that my life wasn't nothing, that somewhere  somehow, I made a difference. That this isn't all I'm left with. I want to die decently. I want to never stop fighting until the end.




But I've stopped wishing for things I know I'm not going to get.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry for everything.






"But before you go, I'd like to ask you something."
"Yes?"
"The Tsimtsum sank on July 2nd, 1977."
"Yes."
"And I arrived on the coast of Mexico, the sole human survivor of the Tsimtsum, on February 14th, 1978."
"That's right."

There's a dark jungle next to the village. People who go into it never return. The villagers fear the jungle. Then one day a man with a torch goes in, the villagers scream at him to not, but he does anyway.

"I told you two stories that accounted for the 227 days in between."
"Yes, you did."
"Neither explained the sinking of the Tsimtsum."
"That's right."
"Neither makes a factual difference to you."
"That's true."
"You can't prove which story is true and which story is false. You'll have to take my word for it."
"I guess so."

He returns the next night, crawling back, bleeding to death, claw marks on his back. With his last breath he says 'Within the Jungle lives a Tiger, who is twelve feet long, obsidian claws, and has fire in its eyes...'

"And in both stories, the ship sinks, my whole family dies, and I suffer."
"Yes, that's true."
"So tell me; if it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? The one with the animals, the one with the tiger, or the story without?"

'...but it is just a Tiger and it bleeds.'

"The story with the animals is the better story."
"... Thank you. And so it goes with god."







After that, he dies. 








--Richard Battle