The night of Simon's death was a difficult night. As Jack sat awake, burdened by the gruesome thoughts that kept him up, he realized he wasn't the only one thinking them. The younger boys tossed and turned on the ground, some of them experiencing nightmares, some of them not sleeping at all. The only person, Jack noticed, who slept through the night without stirring was Roger.
"Sir?" one of the 2nd graders whispered as he crawled over to Jack hours after they'd gone to bed.
"What?" Jack asked flatly, staring into the night sky, unwilling to even look at the child.
"Is the monster dead?" he asked genuinely.
Jack didn't respond because he didn't have a response. He sat with his thoughts for a moment as he felt the little one's piercing gaze on him.
"Go to bed" Jack finally said.
"But—"
"I said go to bed" Jack repeated more sternly, shooting the boy an intolerant glare.
This time, the little one obeyed without a word.
On the opposite end of the beachfront from where the incident had occurred, the boys in Ralph's camp didn't sleep much either. Piggy managed to drift off periodically throughout the night. Sleeping was one way he knew how to escape reality. The little ones who had been part of Ralph's camp before the feast were spending their first night in Jack's camp that night.
Nobody was up early the next morning. The hunters weren't up before dawn as they usually were to begin their pig searching expedition of the day. Piggy didn't rise with the sun either, nor did Ralph. The reason Ralph didn't get up early is because he never slept at all. He wasn't sure he knew how to anymore.
By the late afternoon, Piggy had already tried repeatedly to snap Ralph out of the traumatized trance he was in. He barely moved a muscle all day. He sat with his knees to his chest, staring out into the water. There wasn't anything anyone could say that would've made a difference to him.
Piggy returned to the camp and sat next to Ralph for the third time that day.
"Piggy, what are we gonna do?" he cried his first words of the day, 15 minutes after Piggy had sat down. Ralph's voice was groggy as he cried.
Piggy turned to look at his friend, and could see the heartbreak all over his face, and in his body language. Even considering the way Jack and the others had been acting lately, nothing had prepared Ralph for something to go this wrong.
"That was Simon" Ralph built up the strength and the courage to finally say aloud.
"What good are you doing talking about it?" Piggy responded.
What good are we doing staying silent? Ralph thought to himself, but lacked the strength to say it.
"It was dark, we were scared" Piggy defended.
"I wasn't scared" Ralph countered.
"You were scared" his friend insisted. "Anything could've happened.... it wasn't our fault."
"It was!" Ralph pushed through the tears, "we were there and we didn't do anything about it."
"There was nothing we could do, there was too many of them" Piggy concluded.
"That's not the point."
"It was an accident" Piggy continued to argue, "a terrible accident."
Ralph didn't know exactly what it was, but he was sure that it wasn't an accident. This was preventable. They were supposed to be looking out for each other. Ralph should've been looking out for Simon.
When Sam and Eric ventured over looking for a way to make fire, Ralph tried to get them to talk about what had happened to Simon. They had been there, they were part of it. As much as Jack had been.
"We left early" Eric claimed. "We were real tired" the twins said in unison. They spoke in unison sometimes, but this time it sounded... rehearsed.
Ralph remembered seeing them there, their stunned faces staring into the void where a healthy, unharmed Simon had been only seconds before. They ran off just like the rest of the boys had. After Simon's death. But Ralph wasn't in the mood to challenge them on it.
Ralph and Piggy were the only ones left on Ralph's side. Everyone else had gravitated towards Jack. Piggy insisted that most of them were still good people; that they were following Jack because they were too afraid of him to have him as an enemy. Ralph knew that had been the case with the twins, and maybe Piggy was right. But that didn't change anything now. It didn't matter anymore. Several days after Simon's death, it felt like nothing mattered anymore.
"We don't really know what's out there" Piggy reminded Ralph as they stared out into the ocean.
"I bet there's lots of boats that come by everyday. One of them could rescue us" Ralph suggested. He wasn't sure how much more of Jack and his tribe he could take. He was starting to believe that this island wasn't big enough for the both of them anymore.
"Yeah, suppose it didn't? Suppose it was Russians? We'd be taken prisoner" Piggy explained.
"The Russians wouldn't take us prisoner" Ralph thought aloud.
"I don't know" Piggy retorted, "Major Dingledine, my new dad told me—"
"Major Dingledine?" Ralph resisted the urge to laugh, for the first time in a long time.
"Yeah" Piggy answered simply, "he said if the Russians invaded the U.S., they'd take the kids and separate us from our parents... and I know it sounds weird, but they might make us go into the Olympics or something" Piggy considered.
This time, Ralph really did laugh. It was a sound he'd forgotten he knew how to make.
"I don't see what's so funny?" Piggy said seriously.
"Piggy, I don't think you have to worry about the Russians forcing you into the Olympics" Ralph continued to laugh until Piggy started laughing with him.
Throughout the first week or so after Simon's death, Ralph's two-person camp continued to struggle. By then, the boys had been on the island for just over four months. Ralph and Piggy did their best to avoid coming into contact with Jack and any members of their tribe. They kept to themselves, they took only what food they found to be abandoned on the island, and used only the resources within the bounds of their own camp. Anywhere they knew Jack and his hunters to frequent, they avoided. They played fair. They were only trying to survive.
Ralph continued to focus on the fire atop the hill. Since he and Piggy had ruled out sailing away on a makeshift raft of some sort, his only hope was to keep the fire going at the right times. He and Piggy stuck together, but took turns on fire watch since there was only two of them. They struggled to maintain it without any help from the others, but it was their last and only hope.
Ralph sat in the burnt up grass they'd shrivelled down to nothing the first day they'd tried to light the fire as a group when they arrived on the island. Ralph had no idea how long ago that had been now. He kept track of time for the first three weeks or so, on the island, but eventually he stopped counting every time the sun went down.
He held a stick in his hands, and stabbed at the little wood pile that the fire was burning upon.
Ralph could hear voices coming up the other side of the hill. He didn't want any trouble, but he wasn't about to abandon the little flame he'd lit in hopes of getting rescued. Nothing was more important. With Simon dead, nothing else was important at all.
Jack and Patterson reached the top of the hill and spotted Ralph poking at his little fire with his stick. Ralph would've used Piggy's glasses to get it going. It was the only way they'd maintained the fire over the past four months.
Jack and Patterson stopped in front of Ralph and stared intently at him until he looked up at them.
"Time to go, Captain Kindergarten" Jack said mockingly. Patterson stood defensively at the older boy's side.
"This isn't part of your camp. We're allowed to be here" Ralph countered.
"Oh yeah?" Jack sassed as he bent down and snatched the stick from Ralph's hand. He tossed it behind him and stomped on Ralph's fire.
"Hey!" Ralph screamed as he rose to his feet. "Why can't you just leave us alone?!"
"Because when I tell someone to do something, they'd better do it the first time" Jack said in a stern but low voice as he stepped over the extinguished fire to get into Ralph's face.
"Or what?" Ralph challenged, inching his face closer to Jack's, an attempt to re-establish equality between them.
"Ralph!"
Both boys turned in the direction of the voice. Piggy stood at the edge of the pathway Ralph had taken to get up the hill.
"Come on, let's go" Piggy insisted, gesturing for Ralph to walk away; begging Ralph to walk away.
"Yeah, go back to your fucking fat friend down where you freaks belong" Jack turned back to Ralph, and shoved him as hard as he could.
Ralph fell to the ground, and stared up at Jack, who stood his ground proudly. The memory suddenly flashed through his brain; him and Jack, walking down the beachfront of the island, just over a week after the plane crash. Jack had pushed him down, and Ralph had stared up at him, just as they were right now. When Ralph had pushed his friend back, Jack had shoved him down again. They laughed. They joked around. Ralph had pretended to be hurt to trick Jack into letting his guard down.
"Are you okay?" Jack had asked.
"Sike!" Ralph laughed as he took Jack back down with him. They had both been covered in sand, lying in it, wrestling, laughing until their stomachs hurt.
Ralph's stomach was hurting now, but he wasn't laughing. Jack stood over him at the top of the hill. Piggy watched fearfully from several feet away. Patterson stood just behind the put-out fire, watching Jack's back of course.
Ralph refused to break from the intense glare he was exchanging with Jack. The latter finally took a step back and rejoined Patterson on the other side of the put-out fire.
"Stay out of my fucking way" Jack spat at Ralph and Piggy as he and Patterson made their way back down their side of the hill.
"Didn't we come up here for fire?" Patterson whispered to Jack as they trekked down.
"Yeah, and we'll get it. I promise."