Voting results

A: Hello and welcome to ‘Everybody’s Gonna Die,’ the talk show for dead people, by dead people! I’m your host Alexa Despacito, and no, the therapy isn’t going so well, thanks for asking. Here with me tonight is Tarquin Smith! How are you feeling, Tarquin?

T: This is it, then. I’m dead, am I? Well, it looks about what I expected.

A: You got it! Welcome to the club.

T: Suppose you tell me what happened to that Italian woman. She’s alive now, is she?

A: Alive and well, last we heard, although our producers aren’t exactly able to contact anyone on the other side of the barrier. But I have it on good authority that being alive feels quite amazing, so it’s a reasonable assumption to make.

T: How could you possibly justify such a thing? That’s my soul she’s using, there! She’s gone and stolen my soul!

A: You don’t exactly sound too happy about it, but yes, those are the rules of the game you were playing. What’s wrong with that?

T: It’s ludicrous! Immoral! I didn’t volunteer for any such thing, nor was I even asked for permission! That blasted woman had her one chance to be alive and she went and died so that should be the end of that, shouldn’t it? Getting a second chance to be alive by stealing somebody else’s soul… why, how could it be anything other than evil?

A: You really don’t remember her, Tarquin? Not even her name?

T: Why should I? I never knew her! She’s as much a stranger to me as anyone I pass on the street! The fact that she would single me out for a victim, as someone who’s made a pointed effort to live a moral life – I’m positively incensed! My blood is boiling! Pick a criminal, sure, or a murderer like that child, if a child can even be a murderer, but to attack a man who’s spent his life minding his own business – oh, blast it all!

A: Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll remember her and what you did eventually. You’re going to have a lot of time to think about it, rest assured.

T: It’s just a mistake that I’m even here in the first place, isn’t it? Where does heaven come into all this? Who do I have to speak to in order to prove that I’m innocent, that I led a virtuous life all along and this is just some big mix-up? I haven’t been judged in an appropriate fashion, have I? Don’t I even get so much of a trial?

A: Man, if you had any idea of the sheer number of people who are flowing in here every nanosecond you would understand why you aren’t getting a trial.

T: I demand justice.

A: There’s bound to be plenty of judges in the audience. Priests, too. Maybe go and have a chat with them after you’ve had a long and hard think, and you’ve managed to remember how you altered the course of that Italian Woman’s life. Anyway, we’re trying to run a show here. Did you expect to be the third character to get voted off?

T: Of course I didn’t expect it, did I? I’d only just about resolved to try and win everything to get back to my family. I was trying to hold my team together. I don’t know what I did wrong, but I’m not going to dwell on what-ifs.

A: Our sole piece of reader mail seemed to think it was because you were a ‘boring old fart’.

T: Goodness. Well, I think I can safely dispense with that person’s advice.

A: So what was your favourite moment?

T: I’m supposed to have a favourite moment of that hell, am I? What was there to like? The monsters that wanted to kill me, the people that couldn’t work together on so much as a jigsaw without coming to blows, the nonsensical décor? There’s nothing. Every second of it was torturous and you and your producer cronies should feel only guilt for having dragged a poor old man out of his retirement just to make him jump through hoops, like a rat in a maze!

A: I think it’s dolphins they make jump through hoops. I don’t know, maybe they make rats do it too. What I’m getting at is you didn’t really enjoy your time in the tower?

T: Absolutely not.

A: Who would you like to see voted out next?

T: I don’t want to see anybody ‘voted out’, thank you very much. What I’d like to see right now is for them to take the fight to that creature and knock it down and bust out of that horrid prison, that’s what I’d like to see! I want to see the living stick it to the dead!

A: Look, there must’ve been someone you didn’t really like. It’s okay, you can tell us. We already said we wouldn’t judge.

T: Oh, alright, then. Faust. If I hadn’t spent so much time under his spell maybe I’d have had more time to do something interesting.

A: What do you mean by under his spell?

T: You know exactly what I mean, don’t you? The moping is all an act. He just wants you to take pity on him so that he doesn’t get voted out. Why else would somebody continually resist everybody who tries to cheer him up? As I said before, he had a lot of nerve making me look like the bad guy!

A: And who would you like to see ultimately win it?

T: I don’t know. Maybe Kari? He hasn’t exactly had a good time of it. Maybe that’s why he should get a shot at a proper life.

A: I’m pretty sure Kari is a girl. It was kind of the big reveal and triumphant moment of the last chapter.

T: Okay… anyway, the rest of us adults have already lived out quite a bit of our lives. It’s only right that the younger generation should have their time to shine, isn’t it?

A: Well, currently the most popular character is Saheel, who managed to avoid getting a single vote.

T: He’s going to get a big shock to the system when he ends up here at the end of his life, isn’t he? But he seems a nice enough fellow. I don’t want to get caught up in the nasty business of deciding who lives and who dies, now, do I?

A: What do I know? I’m just a foetus. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, that’s all we’ve got time for tonight. I’ve been Alexa Despacito, this was my guest Tarquin Smith, and this has been ‘Everybody’s Gonna Die’! See you in a week!