I think this is going to be a multi-chaptered story, I'm planning on four or five chapters, so please tell me what you think, those who read this. Constructive criticism welcomed!
She ran. There was no looking over her shoulder or wasting time with a pathetic emotional display, she just ran as though her life depended on it. Well, it really wasn't all that hard, seeing as it did.
The rocky terrain was not conducive to smooth on-foot travel, but she didn't mind. Abby didn't want it to be cut and dry, she didn't yearn for simplicity. She wanted to feel, she wanted to work to keep her balance and focus on the task at hand so she wouldn't have to think about Jimmy. Of course it was all in vain, no distraction could stop her mind from going back to the church. The church where her best friend was supposed to marry the girl of his dreams, the church where Thomas Wellington was practically cut in half, the church where Deputy Lillis was found and made into a human Pez dispenser, and the very same church that Chloe was abducted from.
That fucking church.
Trish's mangled body haunted her mind, but the past week had been so wrought with havoc and gore that she was capable of selective amnesia for the time being. She processed it and stored it in her memory bank for grieving at a later time and place...allowing that she lived long enough to do it.
Trish was dead, as were so many others. She hadn't thought to keep a running tally in her head, but she knew from an earlier list that it must have exceeded two dozen by now. What about Sully? Danny? There were no definite answers concerning them, but she had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach that they had joined the rest of the wedding party. It was a sad state of affairs when one can decisively distinguish fear for a friend's well being from a morbid certainty of their demise.
But Jimmy was alive...is alive? There was a gunshot, even in her frenzied state of mind she couldn't push that irrefutable fact from her thoughts. It had rang, clear as day, but she obeyed his order. His last wish...she shook her head decisively, she couldn't think like that. Wouldn't think like that. Jimmy had more lives than a cat, it seemed, and his penchant for survival had drawn more than a little suspicion. He was alive, he had to be.
She nearly lost her footing but plowed onward, still clutching the flare in her hand, listening only to the sound of her heart throbbing in her throat and the whipping propellers of the helicopter somewhere in the near distance. She was going to make it.
Henry had chased after her, but she was too absorbed in escaping to hear him coming. He called her name once, twice...three times a lady, and she didn't register it for a good long moment. But getting away was more important, and something primal, beyond sense and reason, told her to continue onward. Henry wanted them to escape, he had tirelessly tried to secure it and all he had to show for his efforts was a viciously slaughtered wedding party and a recently murdered bride.
Survival instinct plowed her forward but Henry was quick, he caught up and called her again, and she turned around. And something clicked in her head. But she wasn't ready to believe it. "Where's Jimmy?" she asked, heart pounding and voice wavering.
Henry's expression turned sympathetic. "Wakefield got him," he said and the sadness in her eyes made him shake his head, "I'm so sorry." And he was. The last thing he had ever wanted to do was hurt her, but here they were, in the middle of the woods, and his father was coming. "You know where we were supposed to meet them?" he asked, looking skyward.
With the adrenaline pumping incessantly through her body and her fight-or-flight mode geared toward the latter, she hadn't had time to consider what the coast guard had said...Henry claiming to have not seen Sully when information from a nonbiased source clearly said otherwise.
"The marina." There was a helpless desperation in her voice that he didn't quite understand. He opened the blade from behind his back. "The guy on the radio said...that he talked with you and Sully." She still couldn't believe it. Wouldn't. This was her friend, the reason she had come back to the island. Henry Dunn wasn't capable of murder.
He had told her that she wasn't a killer when they ambushed Wakefield, and her inability to pull the trigger on an unarmed and injured man proved him right. "Neither are you," she had said with complete and total certainty. But right now she found herself incapable of fully believing it. "You said you hadn't seen Sully," there was no accusation yet, just statement of fact but the pain was there and Henry didn't like it.
"I haven't." He couldn't help but wonder why he was bothering to lie. Then he saw her face and knew that the only excuse was that he couldn't stand to see her looking at him like that. "Abby," he said, his father appearing behind her.
"What's wrong?" Even then she sounded like she trusted him, like it was impossible for the boy she had known all those years ago to morph into a psychotic killer when all evidenced was indicative to the contrary.
Henry had realized before that he couldn't kill her, he had ended so many people's life without much emotion or remorse but not Abby. For a man who had killed so many, the thought of causing harm to her was just about enough to make him sick to his stomach.
"It's okay," he said soothingly and he brought his hands to the front of him, knife pointing outward. Her eyes went down to it and her unease sharpened, accompanied by unparalleled fear.
When she looked at him he could see it in her eyes. The doubt, the confusion, the betrayal. And he wanted it to stop. He couldn't stand to have her look at him like that, like he was dangerous. Deranged.
Wakefield stood, at the ready, just waiting for Henry to do it. He hated the weakness that Abby Mills brought out in his son, and he needed to be exorcised of that demon once and for all. Despite Henry's insistence that he was ready to surrender his current persona and fully become Henry Wakefield, his father knew better than to take him at his word. He needed to see it for himself. Needed to see his son end this once and for all.
Henry hoped that his father had finished Jimmy, finally eliminated that pesky annoyance. He had survived for far too long as it was, miraculously escaping his exploding ship and leaving the Cannery massacre unscathed apart from his recently acquired and aesthetically pleasing cuts and burns. Henry could not stand the way he looked at her, the way they looked at each other. Jimmy loved Abby, of this he was irritatingly certain, but he could state with equal conviction that he loved her more.
Harper's Island was Henry's home. In his mind he associated happiness with the island, which more or less meant that the island and Abby were one in the same. Despite his father's best laid plans all he wanted was to live the life he was meant to have, on the island with the woman he belonged with.
He had cared for Trish, at one point he was certain that what he felt was love, but it paled in comparison to the real thing. Trish had been something he grew out of, a youthful and passionate romance that neither of them were mature enough to move forward. Abby was someone he had grown into, she was the only thing in the world that made sense to him anymore. She didn't play games or withhold affection. She was never ambivalent about their friendship, even when they were separated by many miles she made it a priority to stay in contact because they were connected. And they always would be.
He had been in love with her for so long that he couldn't even remember when it had begun or when he had realized it. But Abby was a part of him and loving her was as important to his survival as possessing a working heart or fully functioning lungs, it was an integral part of his DNA and that was something that his father could never and would never fully comprehend.
Wakefield spoke of love, but he didn't understand it. He wanted Abby dead, he wanted her blood to run in the ground, wanted her to take her last breath on the same island where both her mother and father had perished, where she had been born.
And he had to admit, it had a certain air of poetry to it, rife with irony. The Mills line was supposed to end here and now, and Henry could complete his ascension into who he was; Henry Wakefield.
But as Abby stood before him, terrified, vulnerable and clearly shocked and stung by his perceived treachery Henry found firsthand that even the best laid plans go awry.
In a rare moment of clarity, Henry thought about what it was he wanted. To destroy all remaining ties to his former identity, to begin a new life on a clean slate in the only place where he had ever felt that he belonged with the woman he knew he belonged with. He always felt a surge of anger when remembering his parents, their years of lying despite the fact that summer after summer he was thrown in with his own biological mother and became friends with his half sister. It wasn't fair, Mr. and Mrs. Dunn had effectively enabled him to fall in love with his own flesh and blood by their omission.
He nearly vomited the night his father set him free. Not because of the murders, the bloodshed, but because of her. Yes, he had loved Abby then, thought of her often and in a distinctly unbrotherly manner. His own parents had known who she was and they said nothing, watching year after year as they grew closer, by their second summer the pair were nearly inseparable, and yet they remained silent on the matter. They had both breathed a sigh of relief when Henry and Trish had gotten together, for years they had feared that something would happen between he and Abby but they didn't want to upset the apple cart, they were afraid of how he would react.
Summer after summer he begged and pleaded to stay on the island, and they were terrified that if he knew that he had a tangible connection to the Mills he would want to leave his parents and remain on Harper's Island. And they had loved him and had long since entrenched themselves in a ditch of denial in order to justify the continued charade.
Wakefield was ready, excited. He wanted to watch as she took her last breath, see the betrayal in her eyes as she bled out. Maybe she would ask "why?" all pathetic-like and he could have the honor of ignoring the question. Her mere existence almost destroyed the life his son deserved. Like mother, like daughter.
If Henry had to chose between the island and Abby, the latter would win out every time. He saw the vulnerability on her face clear as day and for the first time he was stricken by the odds. What are the chances that she could ever forgive me? He knew that she must have been working hard to conceal how she felt about him, that the pain of hiding her true emotions must have been almost equal to his. But he thought about her expression when they discovered Trish, when her father had been killed in that very creative manner courtesy of John Wakefield, when he had just told her that Jimmy was no more...there was no uncertainty.
It was one of the many things he loved about her, she wasn't prickly and complicated. He knew that she loved her friends, loved her father, loved Jimmy...that was a thought that nearly sent his blood boiling. He couldn't believe it was hitting him now, that after all of his self-deception the truth was outing itself. Abby wouldn't be happy locked up in a house with the man who had orchestrated the deaths of her friends. It was odd that the thought had never really occurred to him, all along he had told himself that she would give in when he offered full disclosure, that once she understood the depth of his affection she would have no choice.
But his certainty wavered.
And what does it matter now? He wondered. Everyone is gone. I'm all that's left. And that truth excited him more than anything else. He had wanted to grandstand, show her how she had been more important than the man who delivered him from a life of mediocrity, that she had been the only person on the earth that he couldn't live without. A world without Abby didn't make sense to him, but if necessary he could leave the island...
He just wanted her to stop looking at him like she didn't know him anymore, when she was the only person alive that had the ability to understand him. He had wanted to keep her to himself, to have it be just them again, like it had been during the summers of their youth. Henry and Abby...together forever. And that was an issue on which he wouldn't compromise.
"It's over," he said, but not to her.
He rushed forward, knife in hand, and pushed her aside. "Get to the marina!" he said, knowing that his father's reaction would be all too telling. The knife entered his chest and for the first time John Wakefield looked surprised.
Abby hesitated for a moment. "Go! Don't wait for me!" She obeyed, still confused. He pretended to grapple with his father, though he was immobile from the shock and pain. "I'll explain later, get to the helicopter now," he said with unmistakable urgency.
And she ran again.
"Henry?" It was his turn to look betrayed, and Henry couldn't blame him.
"It's over," he repeated.
And he watched his father die, it took slower than he would have liked but too fast for him to say anything else. No biting last remarks, no attempt to take Henry down with him. He loved his son and did not understand what had changed. Ironically, it looked as though Wakefield had wanted to ask him 'why,' after all of their careful planning, Henry had changed the rules. Little did Wakefield know, he had always had an alternate objective in mind. But he loved Abby more than he loved his father, and wanted her more than he wanted the island.
Blinking back the tears that welled in his eyes, Henry dropped the knife and ran after Abby, wiping the blood onto his shirt and pants as well as conjuring up a sufficiently horror-stricken expression along the way.
The police met Abby at the marina, instantly taking her by the hands and hoisting her onto the helicopter. She felt no relief as she was forced into a sitting position, but she promised herself that she would never again run like that. She saw their mouths move and sound came out but she couldn't understand a single word they were saying. "The church, go to the church," she said, not sure if this answered any of their innumerable inquiries but too dazed to care.
She didn't understand. For a moment she had thought...no, she had known that Henry was going to kill her. That he was the elusive accomplice, that for some horrible reason he had been the cause of all of his closest friends' and relations' deaths. J.D...Trish...
Several of the uniformed officers sprinted into the woods, weapons at the ready, but three stayed with her. A woman, perhaps a few years older than her, looked Abby in the eyes and slowly spoke. But it didn't help, her heart was pounding in her ears, she was 99 percent sure that she was suffering from shock and for the life of her the words the woman spoke did not make any sense but she could hazard a guess at the question.
"Henry," Abby said without thinking. "He's...I think he's all that's left. He was fighting with...with Wakefield." Her voice was uncommonly steady and Abby fixed her gaze out the window, unblinking, just waiting for him to come into her field of vision. She didn't understand it, she didn't know what was going on, why he had lied about seeing Sully, if the coast guard was mistaken, if she was confused, but for the moment that didn't matter. All that mattered was that Henry was alright, he had attacked John Wakefield to save her life and ordered her to find the helicopter. Those weren't the actions of a killer.
I should have stayed, she thought to herself, but in the back of her mind she knew better. Henry hadn't wanted that, and it was one of the many stupid mistakes that characters made time and again in horror movies. I'll explain later, the words still rung in her ears. What did he have to explain? And dear Lord she prayed that there would be a later. That she could see him again. He was the only thing left that mattered. She would have time to cry for Jimmy, to miss him as well as all the others. Nikki...they had been friends for so long and she had died at such a hectic time that Abby barely had time to miss her.
There had been far too many near misses, too many moments where it seemed as though they were out of danger when at the last moment they were all thrust back in again. They...there was no 'they' anymore. Just Abby, and she hoped beyond hope that Henry had survived.
The officers tried to speak to her, but she was beyond reach. She stared out the window, craning her neck to look for Henry. He had to be okay, he had to be alive. He had saved her life and risked his own, even if the details didn't mesh she couldn't find it in herself to care at present. The woman officer tried to capture her attention, but Abby shrugged her off, eyes never leaving the area that she herself had stumbled out of.
Her willpower finally broke and she blinked, and the moment her eyes reopened Henry was there, covered in blood but seemingly unwounded. She opened the door to the helicopter amidst the protests of the police, but she paid them no mind. And she sprinted again, immediately disregarding her resolution to never run like her life depended on it. It hadn't taken her long to break that promise.
Something in Henry's face was broken, but how couldn't it be? His brother, his fiance and all of his friends had died in one disastrous week. She threw her arms around him enthusiastically and he reciprocated, lifting her off of the ground and spinning her around. The relief was palpable. He kissed the top of her head, lingering for a moment to enjoy the feeling of her in his arms before he reluctantly let her go.
"Oh, God. I thought I lost you," she said, tears running freely down her cheeks, the flare still clutched in her hand. It was hard to believe that paranoia had led her to doubt her best friend, but the evidence had been stacked up against him. But honestly, if he had arranged an elaborate scheme to kill everyone with the help of John Wakefield why on earth would he leave her alive? She had seen him with Trish, and knew that there was no chance in hell that he could ever bring harm to the woman he loved.
Henry shook his head and buried it in the crook of her shoulder. "Never."
They boarded the helicopter together, Henry stood behind her to help her in before turning to the nearest officer and handing him his bloody blade wordlessly. "Where did you get this?" the man asked with a hint of suspicion.
Henry's eyes flickered up and pierced the cop's. "From Chris Sullivan," he said, "he tried to kill me."
Tell me what you think!