He was trying to pretend it was a tropical island paradise.
Gorgeous glittering sand, pristine blue sky, exotic lush jungle.
Like out of one of those travel brochures with all the smiling people and the promises of an once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Perfect.
Or would have been.
If he'd actually had a choice coming here.
If he could stop hearing the Whispers.
If he even thought he might actually get out of here alive.
Now it was no longer a paradise. Now it was like an island version of the Stepford Wives. Perfect on the outside and absolutely all freaky wrong on the inside.
It was a beautiful nightmare.
Hurley had gotten used to some of it by now.
All the fighting.
All the weird creepy crap going on.
The fact that a guy just couldn't get a good burger and fries here.
Or flush toilets.
Well, unless he wanted to go to a secret bunker with a hidden agenda built by an unknown organization.
But then he would be back to one of the weird creepy crap going on things and he really preferred sort of rationing those out to one a week if possible.
He was a big dude and his heart had enough stress on it already.
He did seriously miss his music, though.
It would have let him block out the Whispers.
At first he had felt a sick sinking in his stomach and had started peering out of the corners of his eyes dreading the return of a not too long ago banished 'friend'.
But when he didn't show back up, Hurley began to feel a cold panicked unease that maybe it was some sort of PTSD thing from the falling-from-the-sky-and-now-trapped-on-a-not-so-deserted-Twilight-Zone-island-funhouse.
He'd thought maybe he was going nutso like Locke seemed happily going.
Then the sweat damp hair at the back of his neck started prickling like what it did in one of those really freaky horror movie scenes and he'd known.
The voices were real.
And he was fairly sure this was way, way worse than going crazy.
At least it always ended up worse in the movies when stuff like this started happening.
There were usually psychos.
Screaming.
And lots of blood.
It had made him wish he had his music again bad.
Because Hurley knew he was the kind of guy that really didn't want to know what terrible things were sneaking slowly up behind him. He wasn't a hero. He certainly wasn't even brave, really.
He was just a normal fat guy who fell out of the sky one day.
And into the wrong tropical island paradise.
But the batteries were dead.
So he had to improvise.
He listened to the sound of the ocean waves crashing on the beach and the way the sand seemed to make slithering rushing noises as it was pulled out.
He listened to the sound the wind made as it rustled uneasily through the waxy green canopy of the jungle pressing in on him.
And he listened to even the most mindless and stupid gossip anybody said.
He had to.
Because if he listened to them then he wasn't listening to the Whispers.
And if he wasn't listening to the Whispers, he could pretend this whole thing wasn't going to end like what he thought it was going to end like.
He could pretend that he was actually going to make it off this island alive.
He could pretend that he was really just on some nice fancy vacation somewhere, enjoying the sun and sand. Doing nothing but working on his tan and having one of those overpriced sweet tourist drinks with an umbrella in it. Checking out the ladies. Maybe scarfing down that burger and fries.
Enjoying it all perfectly.
On a tropical island paradise.