“Hey, what do they mean by death? They can’t mean… death death, right?” The Rabbit blinks innocently. She’s a rumpled girl whose body looks like it’s been forged from a cloud; she takes off her coat and wraps it snug around herself like a blanket.
“It’s natural in a game of Mafia to say that people die, so it’s probably just a turn of phrase,” I say, as I’m promptly ignored. This isn’t really a game of Mafia yet, not the sole place where I’m strong. This is more of a classroom in chaos, with an endless slew of names, voices, and faces that I can’t quite pair.
The tall, bookish, blue-haired girl, the Rooster, is the one who brings us to order. “This is an organization that drugged us, kidnapped us, and burned us. I can’t believe this, but they could easily kill us too. The only way we’ll know for sure is by testing the rules… but the first person to do so will take on a great risk.
“Unless someone is brave enough to do otherwise, I think it’s best to hide our real names and call one another the animal on our collars, for example; or we’ll have already broken the code of conduct.”
That all sounds rather sensible. My personal role is villager, and based on the rules set out for me, I have a duty to hunt all wolves til their eventual “death.” However, I also have my own secret purpose, based on my dull feelings of existential dread—and perhaps breaking the rules intentionally would serve that purpose well?
Or, because of those same deadened feelings, I might just wait.
50:54
50:53
50:52
A slouching boy then rises, hands inside his hoodie pockets. Despite the Rat’s face being shrouded, he seems oddly familiar, a scrawny guy with mussed up hair and a lazy grin.
All eyes are on him.
“I just ooze charisma, I know.”
His footsteps ring out in the voting chamber until he’s by the double doors. “I’m not breaking any rules. I’m just trying to uh, go to the bathroom.”
Click.
“...Tch, it’s locked.”
Click. Click. Click.
“They can’t cage us!” The Tiger rallies and charges towards the jammed doors. She kicks them, skirt fluttering. Thud! Thud! Thud!
“Let me try,” the Ox says. He’s the opposite of the Rat: the boy’s a buzz-cutted musclehead who's stout, reliable, and clean. THUD! THUD! THUD!
The Horse is yet another athlete who had been completely quiet up until now, nervously fidgeting with her brown ponytail. She then speaks up, and quite loudly at that. “If we all do it together, then maybe we can escape!”
“Rather than escape, wouldn’t that mean we’d all just die?” If death truly does mean ‘death,’” the Rooster muses, and then there’s a few more wise words from the Rat.
“Nah. We’re not escaping. Like I said, we’re all just trying to “go to the bathroom,” that’s all.”
As the players crowd around the door, pounding, scratching, and clawing, three people stay behind. One of them is the Rooster, who writes in her notebook, slowly. She presses her pen to her forehead and sighs; she’d switched chairs to one that’s closer to the door so she could keep the mob in sight, but she refuses to take part in the fracas.
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Another one lingering behind is myself, the so-called Snake. I can’t tell you why I refuse to move. It’s just that even in this situation, everything just seems so dull.
The final person is the Goat. His face, which had already been pale at the beginning, is now near-vampiric. “I’m not feeling too good…”
His glasses slide off and clatter onto the floor. He coughs, and blood-flecks then spatter onto the table and onto the Rooster’s horrified face.
“Sorry… I’m supposed to be in the hospital. Let me just… get some rest…”
His body slackens, and he falls forward, forward, forward—crack—and slams his head against the desk. More blood flows from a gash in his forehead, and his breathing soon grows faint.
The Rooster stands, expressionless. Redness stains her shirt and face, and this palette finally makes her stand out to my eyes. The cloth’s dripping fluid brings some color to my washed out senses, and in this fragile, frozen moment she approaches the limp boy.
She gingerly rests two fingers on his neck. “I can’t find a pulse.”
People react differently the first time they see someone die. Some stop thinking, as if by failing to acknowledge a person’s death then that person will remain alive. Others find themselves in tears, either from mourning the person they just lost or because they were reminded someday they too will pass. But when most people see the light snuffed from someone’s eyes, they try to search for the embers.
“Don’t just stand there! Someone call five-one-one!” Lily shouts.
“I-I got it!” says the Pig, shaking, as she pulls out her cell phone. On it dangles a keychain of what looks like Magical Girl Mikarin (airing this spring on Fridays at 8:00PM AST). She dials with trembling fingers. 5-1—backspace. 1-1—backspace, backspace. 1-1-1.
The Tiger snatches it away and pressed the buttons: 1-1-0, enter. Then she throws the phone onto the tiled floor. “There’s no bars. What kind of shit provider do you have?”
“I don’t have any bars either,” I say lethargically.
“Nothing’s going through for me,” says the Ox, as the Rooster slowly backs away from the corpse.
…‘It’ll be okay’ ‘There has to be something we can do’ ‘It gets better’..
We desperately cling onto those comforting words. Those shards of wisdom are like pieces of driftwood tossed to sailors drowning in the sea—useless strips that can’t possibly live up to our expectations, can’t possibly save our lives.
The Dragon, that tall, dark-haired, calm-voiced boy roars at the TV. “The Goat didn’t break any rules of the game! You can’t let him die! That’s just not fair! Not to me, the Goat, the Rabbit, or anyone!”
“Don’t make this any worse on yourself!” Lily agrees, calling out to the timer on another monitor. “You’ll get arrested for not just assault and kidnapping, but for manslaughter too!”
But…
“It’s hopeless.” I lean back in my chair and watch the clock tick down.
44:46
44:45
44:44
Soon the commotion shifts back to where the Goat lies—or rather, the Goat’s slumped form.
“Hey, hey, hey, bro stay with us!” The Ox says as the Dragon moves past him. The other tall boy speaks fast.
“Clear the area. I’ll do CPR.”
CPR? Maybe… I think to myself, though I still look at the clock. The commotion to me is just that— a “commotion,” a distant series and sequence of sounds, and while I don’t witness the Dragon pump the Goat’s heart directly, I can hear the Dragon’s own labored breaths.
Crack.
40:41
Crack. Snap. Crack.
40:40
Crack. Snap. Thump. Crack.
Lily’s voice, now. “You’re hurting him… you’re breaking his ribs.”
40:39
Crack. Snap.
“It’s the right thing to do,” the Rooster says. “If we want him to survive.”
40:28
Crack. Snap. Crack.
Someone’s crying. Squeaking hiccups that can’t cover the sound of crunching bone.
Crack. Crack.
35:50
Crack… Crack.
30:34
“It’s time to give up…” says a girl’s cutting, biting, bitter voice.
“CPR sustained over forty minutes has the best outcome,” says the Dragon, and then—
“We don’t have forty minutes!” The bitter Tiger repeats. “Isn’t that obvious? If they don’t care about his death, then they don’t care about our own lives either. If time runs out, we probably die for real…”