Essence script excerpt from second night

A/N: PLEASE READ THIS FIRST SO THE PASSAGE MAKES SENSE. LIKE SRS IT WILL BE GOBBLEDYGOOK OTHERWISE.

This is a lousy - I mean..."unpolished" excerpt from my WIP script of Essence, which I have been rewriting for the past several months. So I can focus on cranking out the story, I'm waiting until I am ~100% finished to start editing and overhauling. I haven't caught any gross technical errors in this passage, but it IS the first draft, so the style, content, and syntax are subject to change. Thus, I would LOVE to hear your thoughts. Seriously, don't hold back - be as critical, honest, or 'wat shin wth is this trash' as you wish. I promise I can beat myself up much better than you or anyone else can, so don't worry about hurting my feelings!

If you haven’t played the demo, I wouldn’t read this excerpt, since it assumes the reader is familiar with the plot and characters. If you have, though, I still need to explain a few things.

Due to malfunctioning in Alice’s system, she frequently hallucinates. Though this often manifests in green static and haze (or “the green”), the figures from her fragmented memories also emerge from the fog to torment her.

In the passage, the “young ones” and “giggling” she mentions refer to a pair of little girls that appear in her dreams and hallucinations. Before this scene, when Alice and Cath are crossing the carcass-ridden wasteland, the girls giggle incessantly until Alice “hears” a woman scold them. This manifestation, spurred as Alice snags the hem of a skeleton’s maternity dress, is the “pregnant corpse” Alice refers to.

Additionally, the “eyes” and “audience” she describes are the people she was forced to kill over and over during her nine-month coma. Because her memories are corrupted, the victims’ faces are pixelated save for their eyes – which is how she came to identify the men and women she repeatedly murdered in her nightmares. After enduring their accusing eyes for nine months, she cannot stand being stared at.

===

Until the fog thins enough to see its shimmer, I don’t notice my heart beaming through the growing shadows.

Instead of rippling like water, the green light storms as the wasteland seeps back in. As the sun trickles behind them, purple mesas glow like my chest. Aside from the ruins of a station, the cliffs alone bind the nothingness I thought was boundless.

I jump when Cath speaks for the first time in hours.

C: “There’s food inside. Good with camping?”

A: “…If I a-answered, could you hear me over your headphones?”

C: “Sorry, what?”

Sniffing, he starts toward the pumps without lowering the volume.

A: “…With your head up your ass, would you hear me without your headphones?”

He only stumbles for a second, but it’s a second that he can’t strut toward the store unruffled. His head wouldn’t fit in those jeans, anyway.

If I hadn’t held my breath when Cath tied off his mouth, I’d keel over at the storefront. The crumbled walls heave rot worse than eggs and toilets.

C: “Shall I compare thee to a skunk’s decay?”

Feet from a hole that nearly consumes the building’s face, Cath prances through the door.

C: “Thou art more pungent than gym socks, more rancid than – ”

He wheels and grips the door chimes interrupting his poetics. As he steps back, they still whisper, determined to voice an entrance no one but us will ever hear.

C: “…You gonna stand there? You should eat.”

I grimace at the trail of tiny, mushy skeletons while Cath skips around the junk-food coffins as if he’s playing hopscotch.

A: “…I’m good.”

C: “Even if you’re plastic, you can metabolize food. How else could they market Chef Barbie?”

I’ll admit, the two-liter just inside the hole looks tempting. As a projectile.

A: “I’ll metabolize rat leftovers when you do.”

Swinging open a dead cooler, Cath stretches his collar to drops bottles and cans inside.

C: “Tch, don’t write off what you haven’t tried.”

Pivoting toward the shelves, he follows suit with candy bars and gum, eyes widening when he spots a jumbo pack of marshmallows. In the wake of a dreamy sigh, he shoots me with a stern finger.

C: “You need to modify your perception. Don’t think ‘guts,’ think ‘sauce.’ Protein, if you’re lucky enough to get one with fur.”

I think he’s kidding until he transfers a marshmallow from his shirt to his mouth. My nose scrunches imagining the sugar along with the rats’ stench, which only worsens as he sloshes around a jug of lighter fluid.

A: “You…r-really can’t wait til you get outside?”

C: “Ah’m tryin’ ‘fore buyin’.  Joo wanf sumfin?”

A: “I’m not hungry. That even safe for you to eat?”

He licks the mush caking his lips and twirls out the door with blank-faced contentment.

C: “Processed food only ripens with age.”

A: “No, I mean…is it infected?”

C: “That whole room is clean.”

I follow Cath to a rock face, where a scrawny tree dodges the day’s final arrows. Untucking his shirt, he dumps his food and sits, but I step toward the blobs wriggling on the pasty bark.

C: “As of now, Blight can’t eat up bone. So once it ate up all those rats’ flesh, it ran its course. You can’t catch it in there anymore.”

A: “So…how are these guys still alive?”

Like sleds stranded in the arctic, five caterpillars stumble through the bends of the tree, my heart sparkling above them like a northern aurora. As they scurry from the light, their exoskeletons shimmer, as shiny and hard to the touch as obsidian.

C: “Those armored things? They’ll die soon enough.”

Cath squints, snaking closer.

C: “Hard shell’s worthless when there’s nothing left to eat you.”

Now and again, one pauses to nibble at the bark, but her teeth are too weak to scrape up a morsel. So she paces for a few seconds before forgetting and trying again, only to reap the same reward.

A: “…Do you have anything I could feed them?”

C: “Tch. When’s the last time you saw a worm eat a Cheeto?”

A: “They’re not wo – ”

Cath whips out his gun and fires, sending three branches tumbling before I can blink. While he slinks around and stacks the debris, I gape at the tiny creatures milling around the trunk in terror.

A: “Y-you – ”

C: “ – are sorry about the tree, I mean it. But it’s dead. And I want s’mores.”

He dumps the lighter fluid and tosses a lit match into the pile. As quickly as the mass outdoes the sky’s orange residue, the caterpillars thrash into the new hidey-holes. Their tyrant yawns and dangles a fist-sized sugarwad over the fire.

My fist curls, but my energy tapers like the amber tongues. More than I mind sitting next to Cath, I want to force the tree and young ones as far away as I can. It’s easy enough to ignore him when I have to peer over the mound of spoils to see him.

Wood groans, fire snarls, and his headphones buzz, but the darkness pens us up before he finally makes a sound. Clicking them off, he drops his headphones. Before tightening with the strain of six marshmallows, Cath’s frown sags lower than normal.

He glares at his sneakers, avoiding the fire like I do the starless sky, before glaring at me.

C: “You hungry?”

A: “No.”

C: “Then how ‘bout you stop oglin’ me like a piece’a meat?”

A: “…I’m metal. Shouldn’t I be impressed?”

Although you’re far from a fine cut.

C: “Then worship me with words. Not your creepy-ass eyes.”

He hunches closer to his soda. Minutes pass in insignificant noise – I fold a squeaky bag into a frog, Cath munches, fizzes, and sighs – but they barely mask the silence looming over our bubble. No crickets. No wind. A highway yards away, but no rumbling tires or horns. Just high-pitched giggling, stifled in fear of hair being pulled.

Cath starts when I gasp in the syrupy air, though I wish I hadn’t when it mixes with my memories of the pregnant corpse. After shaking his head, he crumples up again, leaving me lonelier and colder by the fire than I ever was in the wasteland.

A: “…You say you don’t know me. F-fine.”

Sniffing.

A: “So why did you wait on me?”

His beak doesn’t even acknowledge me this time.

A: “…P-please, Cath.”

I pin his hand the moment it crawls toward his headphones, locking my fingers tighter when he bares a face more grim than the skulls’. Though his jaw creaks open, his arms and legs grow stiff as a coffin.

C: “What do you see out there?”

I peek past him into the dark, half-expecting something to leer back, but –

A: “There’s nothing.”

C: “What? No shopping mall?”

Beneath my hand, the rubber glove whines. Even with the wild light tearing across him, not a single blink disrupts his gaze. I shudder and look at the fire, but eyes are still on me.

C: “No theme park? Carnival?”

A: “Don’t…stare at me.”

But he continues, joining the audience that’s watched me for the past nine months. I feel his nails curl into the dirt.

A: “I’m s-serious.”

The bag beneath his eye spasms in time with the flames.

C: “Not even a drive-thru. What else did I have to do besides wait on you, then?”

I lift my hand, but it doesn’t rise an inch before he hooks it down with his.

C: “I had other options, sure. Coulda been trampled by a mob. Run over at by an idiot driving 90 miles an hour to dodge a virus he already had.”

I writhe out of his grasp, but he stays faceted on me.

C: “Thrown in a death camp if I so much as sneezed. Shanked by a grandma for drugs or worthless money.”

Every time I turn back, green pixelates his face til only his eye beams through – probing, judging, seething – a single green high-beam in the midst of hundreds.

A: “Stop – staring – ”

C: “The world’s a fine place, Alice. Just dandy. So don’t begrudge me for keeping all that fun to myself. I’m doing you a favor, keeping you in the dark – ”

Before the word leaves his lips, I snap to my feet.

A: “Are you s-serious? Really? You think you’ve l-lived through hell? That sitting and staring at a wall, cramming your face with cookies and candy for nine months is hell? Nothing…nothing you tell me could be worse than what I’ve already done. You’re not keeping me in the dark, Cath. I haven’t been able to get out of it for the past nine months.”

Throughout my rant, Cath sits rigid, letting my spit and the fire flog him as much as they would. As I leer over him, he stares at me like I’m nothing more than a column of air. But then he rolls up, leans in, and casts a much greater shadow than me.

C: “Maybe you suffered, but you sure looked comfy in that chair to me.”

A: “…”

C: “Maybe each dream you had was a nightmare, but I couldn’t sleep. I lived. For nine months, watched hell grow hotter, realer every day. Watched it scarf down the sun til the whole world was as dark as that damn room. I only left so I wouldn’t starve. I only stayed with you so I could believe there was one human face that wouldn’t take one look at me and try to rip me apart. For God-knows-what reason. Thinking I was an EA, thinking I had money...tch.”

Cath’s laughter pours out through a flurry of squares.

C: “And then the first thing you did was try to rip me apart. When people came at me, they really meant to kill me.”

His eye flickers to my fist before he drifts back to the ground.

C: “When people came at me, I really...”

A: “…You…really…killed them…?”

Like rocks split my eardrums, I go deaf to all noise. Green trickles and saturates the fire all the way from the mutilated tree.

A: “What does that mean?...You think I didn’t really kill people?”

Even as the fog swells, I see the caterpillars wheel faster until they match the pace of my heart. Cath looks straight at me, speaking slowly enough for me to read his lips.

C: “Dreams are dreams, scrap metal.”

The green erupts from the earth, consuming the fire and sky in a surge. It drowns the glow with an inferno, but neither of us flinches. Cath’s mouth moves, but I don’t hear him.

 A: “Don’t you dare speak to me.”

I don’t even hear myself anymore.

A: “Don’t look at me, don’t follow me, don’t ever think of bothering me again.”

I whip and dart out of the heat, away from him like I’ve wanted all day. Not four steps out, the giggling scampers close, rushing me into the darkness that chills me more than death.