"I DON'T WANT YOU!" Abby screamed at Henry, her fury causing her hands to clench and shake violently. A darkness passed over his face before, out of nowhere, Jimmy barreled into him, sending them careening to the rocks below.
Abby froze; neither Jimmy or Henry were moving. She came back to her senses and clambered down the hillside, racing to Jimmy's side.
"Jimmy…Jimmy?" she whispered, cradling his head in her hands. "Are you okay?"
"No," Jimmy mumbled, trying to stand. Abby whirled around to see Henry, weaponless, lunge at Jimmy and send a powerful right hook into his temple. Abby, horrified, watched as Jimmy crumpled back to the ground, bleeding from a gash in his forehead.
"Come on," ordered Henry, gripping Abby's arm roughly and leading her back up the hill.
"No!" she screamed, trying to pull away to get back to Jimmy. "Jimmy!"
Henry jerked her away, breathing hard, and she cried helplessly. Guarded, quiet Abby was sobbing openly.
---
"Nothing," Chloe whispered, still fighting the brutal pain in her shoulder.
"I'm sure someone saw," Cal tried to reassure her that the flare had been effective.
"I think that was Abby back there."
"You think we should go check it out?" Cal asked, looking down.
"Yeah. We can't just leave her with him," Chloe answered.
"You're right, darling, let's go."
Cal and Chloe walked back into the woods, searching for Abby and Jimmy. They continued to call their names, going one way and then turning, looking in every ditch. Chloe glanced over a hill once, then did a double take when she saw someone on the rocks below.
"Cal, over here. It's Jimmy."
By the time Cal and Chloe reached him, Jimmy was dazed and trying to sit up.
"Abby," he groaned, "Henry got her."
Cal inspected the inch-long gash in Jimmy's forehead and deemed it non-critical before he pulled him to a standing position.
"We need a game plan," Jimmy suggested. "He only left me because he left his knife somewhere when he got to Abby."
"I don't think he's going to stop until we're all dead. We're the only ones that can stop him," Chloe said, staring blankly out at the ocean before them.
"You're right. He wants to get rid of us, and if he does, no one will ever know the truth," Cal decided.
"We need to save Abby."
"We're going to," Cal assured Jimmy, "but we can't go in blind. This is our last shot."
"I could get him out of that house," Chloe offered.
"Not alone, you can't," Cal said quickly.
"How about this?" Jimmy asked, and explained his thoughts.
"That could work," Cal thought out loud. "We need to find that knife, though. We need to be able to defend ourselves should something go wrong."
Before he even finished his statement, Chloe had disappeared over the hill. Cal yelled for her and started to follow her, but before he reached the top, Chloe emerged smiling, waving the boarding knife. "Found it."
"That's my girl," Cal said admiringly. He turned to Jimmy and waved. "Let's go."
---
The journey back to the house was long and silent, Cal and Chloe walking hand in hand with Jimmy right behind. Cal was trying to not think of all the ways this contrivance could fail, but the pessimistic thoughts were unavoidable. When they reached the house, Jimmy pointed out their positions.
"Ready?" he asked.
"No," Chloe said. "No, Cal, I don't think I can do this. We can't kill him. I've seen enough death to last a lifetime."
"Chloe. You can do this. It's going to get us out of here," Cal whispered to her, taking both of her hands in his own. He leaned forward and kissed her deeply. "Nothing can go wrong," he lied, trying to make her more comfortable with this.
Chloe nodded, biting her lip against the still-searing pain in her shoulder. She wondered, in the back of her mind, if it should still feel like it was burning through her whole body.
She handed Cal the boarding knife, the one that had almost killed him and the one that had impaled her through her shoulder. Jimmy said, "I'll go in when the door slams." Cal nodded.
"Right." Jimmy headed around the side of the house, to where the front door was. He was sure it wouldn't be locked, but he had Abby's lock pick in his pocket just in case. He squatted against the wall and waited for the sound of Henry leaving out the side door.
Cal crouched in a bush, gripping the boarding knife. He could faintly hear Henry yelling at Abby in the second story of the house. He watched Chloe as she picked up a rather small rock, but it was big enough to do the job. She paced back and forth for a minute, turning the rock over in her hands. She stopped beside a tree, ready to throw the rock.
Chloe leaned against the tree for a moment, letting a sudden wave of nausea pass. She was shaking, but not just from anxiety and fear. Even under three layers, she was getting chills. She stood straight up, took a deep breath, and hurled the stone at the large glass window.
Cal watched as it sailed through the air and shattered the window loudly upon contact. Chloe took a step forward, stopped, and Cal gasped as her eyes rolled back in her head and she sank to the ground.
Cal hesitated. This wasn't part of the plan, was it? "Chloe!" he hissed, hearing footsteps pounding down the stairs inside the house. He couldn't run out now, so he tried to pull himself together and waited on the door to open.
He crouched lower in the bushes, his heart racing, as the door swung open slowly and Henry looked at Chloe. She was sprawled across the ground and her face was unnaturally pink. He hesitated before leaving the door open and ducking back inside and reemerging with a jackknife. He slammed the door behind him and walked toward Chloe.
Now! Cal told himself, and crept quietly out of the bushes and followed Henry. Henry was five feet from Chloe when Cal tapped him on the shoulder with the boarding knife. Henry whirled around, pointing the jackknife at Cal.
"Put it down, Cal," he warned.
Cal was about to reach out and stab Henry, but then he thought about how Chloe had said they couldn't kill him. For her sake, he lashed out at Henry with the handle of the boarding knife and hit him in the forehead with as much force as he could muster. Henry looked at Cal in surprise for a second before blacking out.
Cal immediately forgot about Henry and ran to Chloe's side, pressing the backside of his palm against her forehead. She was burning with fever, and Cal concluded that the wound in her back was most likely infected.
"Not good," he muttered. He was removing his belt to bind Henry's wrists when Jimmy and Abby burst through the door. "What happened?" Abby said, walking over to Cal's side.
"Fainted from fever. I think the wound's infected; I need to treat it immediately."
Jimmy took off his own belt and wrapped it around Henry's ankles, but not before kicking his limp arm and saying, "You bastard," under his breath.
Jimmy picked Henry up and slung him over his shoulder and Abby pocketed the jackknife that was laying on the ground. "Let's get her to the clinic," he said roughly, and Cal picked Chloe up, cradling her in his arms.
Her eyes fluttered open. "Cal?" she asked, weak and disoriented.
"Shh, baby, it's all right. I've got you," he whispered to her, starting to walk, and she passed out again, her head hanging on his shoulder. His own wound was throbbing dully as he carried her, and he was lost in thought as they trekked through the woods yet again.
"Oh, no," Abby said, pointing at a shape fifty feet ahead.
Jimmy gripped her hand, keeping her from running to see without him.
As they grew nearer, realization hit Cal like a deadweight. "Sully," he breathed, not fully believing what he saw. The body of his comrade lay on the ground as if simply discarded. Cal set Chloe down on the ground and knelt down next to Sully, biting his lip to hold back the tears. But as he stared into Sully's expressionless eyes, he let himself cry for a minute while Jimmy and Abby looked away.
Henry hadn't mentioned killing Sully when he'd told Jimmy and Cal the story, so it came as a jolting shock to find him dead. Cal recovered himself, trying not to think of how Sully saved his life, and gently closed Sully's eyes.
"We should bring him back, you know," Cal said, wiping his face on his sleeve. "So his family can give him a proper burial."
Jimmy felt Cal's pain and although uncomfortable with the idea of carrying a corpse and the person responsible for the death at the same time, he gently picked up Sully's body and carried him over his other shoulder, grunting with exertion.
Cal lifted Chloe back up again, and they made their way to the clinic, only arriving after a ninety-minute walk, during which Chloe never stirred.
The town was completely deserted; Jimmy was sure that the five of them were the only living souls around. Cal shoved the door to the clinic open and went into the examination room. He gently laid Chloe down on the exam table after shoving off the bloody sheets that remained there from when he'd worked on Sheriff Mills.
"Abby?" he called into the reception area, where she and Jimmy were waiting.
She pushed open the door a moment later. "Need something?" she asked softly.
"Can you get a rag and soak it with cold water, please? Then bring me some gauze from that cabinet over there."
Abby found a couple of cloths in a supply closet and ran one under the cold tap until it was soaked, then brought it to Cal. Cal pressed it to Chloe's forehead, trying to keep her cool under the heat of the fever.
Abby handed Cal a roll of gauze as he stripped off Chloe's tops. He gently rolled her over so she was lying face down so he look at her wound. As he had expected, the injury was swollen, red, and hot to the touch. It was barely bleeding, but oozing a yellowish liquid.
"Infected," Cal concluded, lifting a bottle of Betadine from the table behind him and soaking the gauze with it. He carefully cleaned out the deep wound and re-wrapped it with fresh gauze. He turned Chloe back over and tried to revive her.
He asked Abby to look for a certain antibiotic in the back cabinets while he ran the cold water cloth over Chloe's body, but he stopped when her lower lip twitched. Her eyes opened slowly, taking in her surroundings. As she came to, the fear gnawing at Cal's stomach slowly departed.
She was delirious with fever, though, so when Abby brought Cal the medicine he'd requested, he wasted no time in getting Chloe to take it. As soon as she'd taken it, though, she fainted again. Cal kissed her cheek and stood, patiently waiting for the fever to break. He knew he wouldn't' be leaving her side again. He was checking her temperature with a thermometer every few minutes. It had originally been 103.9°F when she'd first been given the medicine. Over the course of an hour, in which Abby constantly checked for updates, her fever spiked to 104.1°F, but slowly declined to 99.7°F.
As long as the infection didn't spread, she'd be okay now that the fever was almost gone. Cal stared out the window, taking in the peace of the moment. Jimmy startled him by busting through the door.
"He's starting to wake up," Jimmy told Cal.
"Do we want him awake?" Cal asked. "If not, I can tell you where to find a pretty strong sedative."
"I don't know, I think it's going to bother Abby even more to see him awake and alert. She's trying not to fall to pieces in there."
Cal told him what to look for in the back cabinets, not noticing that Chloe was awakening.
"You've got him?" she asked as Jimmy rummaged carelessly through the bottles of medications.
Cal was too tired to answer, but in his relief that she was awake and seemingly okay, he bent down and kissed her happily. He broke away, nodding. "We've got him."
"Hey, Chloe," Jimmy said, shaking out two pills from the bottle he'd found.
"Hi, Jim-" Chloe started to say, but when she realized she was in jeans and a bra, she quickly sat up and folded her arms over herself.
As Jimmy left the room laughing, she spoke up again.
"So what happened?"
"You threw the rock and fell. Henry heard and came down with a jackknife, but I jumped out behind him and got him before he got you," Cal supplied.
"Is he dead?" Chloe asked.
Cal shook his head. "I couldn't. I just knocked him out."
Chloe nodded, but still looked scared. "I think he's going to try to get away, no matter how we try and prevent it."
"We've got him tied and sedated, and Abby and Jimmy are keeping watch over him."
"Cal, I saw the sheet when Jimmy left. Who's under the sheet in there?" Chloe asked, desperately not wanting to know, but curiosity and fear got the better of her.
Cal sighed. "Sully. We found him on the way here, and…"
Chloe nodded quickly, at a loss for words. Then she swore, her eyes filling up with tears.
"It's okay, Chloe," murmured Cal, letting her head fall against his chest.
"No," she sobbed, "it's not okay. Nothing's okay! All of my friends are dead, and we almost were too!"
Cal stroked her hair, letting her cry it out.
"Cal, you're all I have left," she whispered.
---
Jimmy poked his head out of the front door of the clinic. He could have sworn he heard something. He looked towards the small dock that was the next best thing to the marina and saw a boat starting up.
"Guys, a boat!" he yelled back into the clinic.
Abby jumped up, leaving Henry bound on the floor. Chloe, in Cal's sweater, raced out, followed by Cal. Chloe was going purely on adrenaline; her strength was minimal and made even worse by blood loss and fever. They ran, screaming and yelling, towards the dock as the boat pulled out.
---
Officer Andrew Smith started the engine on his small motorboat, his search having proven fruitless. He'd been looking for Chloe Carter and Cal Vandeusen, the two that had radioed hours ago to say they'd had a boat and were heading to the mainland. The state troopers had never seen a boat coming their way, so they had sent Officer Smith to the island to do a quick check and see if he could find them.
He hadn't, after patrolling the town and woods for the better part of an hour, so he pulled his boat out of the dock. He couldn't wait to get away from the island. It gave him the creeps.
AN: So, my longest chapter so far. It's not very dramatic, or very good, in my eyes, but I wasn't sure how to get this one done. I promise, the next chapter will be better. I hope. Review, please? :)
