Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, I'm just having fun with them.

A/N: So this is the chapter with my favorite line in it. Interestingly enough, said by Wufei; go figure. I got enough reviews to bug me into updating early, so here you go. See? Reviews do make me update. And they make me happy. Hint hint. Anyway, enjoy!

Chapter 10

By now, I didn't really even mind the trees. I used all the tricks I'd picked up over the last week to move quickly and quietly back toward the beach. I moved for over an hour before I heard any noise, which was encouraging since it meant no one was anywhere near our hideout yet. The rustling came from the ground, which was even better. I moved closer, keeping to trees with lots of leaves so I was hard to see.

It took me a good five minutes to triangulate and find the source of the noise, since it came in spurts and was getting quieter. I find out why when I got there. A hunter had stumbled into one of our more deadly traps and sprung a net with sharpened wooden stakes in it.

The stakes were short and spaced all over, so it was pretty much impossible to get below or around them in the net, as this guy had demonstrated. He was slowly bleeding out from gashes, although he'd just about managed to get out of the net. It actually looked like he'd injured himself worse moving around.

Currently he was trying to saw through the net with a wicked-looking knife. As I watched, his hand shook and he dropped the knife. He wavered for a few minutes and then seemed to pass out. I gave it some more time to be sure and then carefully moved to a tree directly over his position. I hooked my legs on a branch and dangled backwards above the guy. Nope, not breathing.

I decided to rearm the trap and leave the body where it was, just to screw with the head of anyone else who came this way.

While I was at it, I went through the guy's pockets for anything useful and took his weapons since I was currently unarmed. The only things I found besides the knives and a handgun were a fountain pen with no ink and pocket lint, which wasn't really surprising since these people had never had any intention of being on the island longer than a few hours. I set one of the knives up on my left hip for cross-body draw and put the other one at the back of my neck where I could reach it with either hand. The handgun I checked to make sure the safety was on and then shoved in my right pocket; I didn't have any experience with handguns and didn't want to chance it. The knives were more familiar.

It might seem like all the death and destruction wasn't bothering me. And is sort of wasn't, but only because I was refusing to let it. If I fell apart at this point, Bad Things would happen and people were counting on me. I was doing now what I'd done earlier on the boat and compartmentalizing my thoughts, shoving all the shit I did not have time to deal with now to the back of my head so I could have one massive breakdown later. I treated searching and moving the body as a task to be done and nothing else. Now was the time for action; later was the time for catatonia.

I got everything re-setup and got back in the trees and kept moving, listening for any more noises.

I wandered for a good three hours without anything major happening. I ran across two more bodies in the woods, one a lot closer to the beach and one somewhere in the mid-range that I was spending most of my time in. One body had already been stripped by someone else, although I had no clue who it was; could have been another hunter for all I knew, since that trap involved a noose and couldn't be reset. The other body had a compass that I pocketed and a shotgun I slung over my shoulder after making very very sure the safety was on and it wouldn't go off when I didn't want it to. That would have been not fun. I took the guy's ammo and backpack-pouch-thing too, since the ammo would be nice to have and I was seriously running out of pocket space.

Since my wandering attempts at running into the others were epically failing, I decided to head in the general direction of home base. If I was lucky, maybe I'd run into one of the guys on the way. If I wasn't, I could still ditch the shotgun and handgun; hauling them around was getting damned awkward, damned quickly. Stupid hooky bits on tree branches…

I took the scenic route on my way back to make sure my trail was hard to follow and as a check to see if any hunters were getting to close. The sky was just starting to think about maybe getting dark when I stuck my head into base. "Hey, Quatre, any news?" I waved as I headed towards him.

He straightened up and headed towards me from where he had been showing one of the new kids how to tie a good knot in a vine. There was a whole group of them working on what looked like some nets and a few stakes. That was a good idea; we could fix old traps or add new ones as long as we had the materials. "Not much. Trowa dropped by to check in and make sure everything was going all right. Heero came by once to give a more complete story into the radio in some sort of code and dropped off the boy with him; he said he didn't like the distraction." Quatre frowned as I looked over to pick out the unfamiliar face in the group. "The poor boy was devastated."

I decided to derail that conversation before it got started. "Look at it this way, he's safer in here than out there. Heck, that might even have been Heero's intention in ditching him. You never know." As I talked I pulled the shotgun off my shoulder and the handgun out of my pocket. "Speaking of safety, you know how to use either of these?"

He frowned. "Not very well."

"I guess we can just call them additions to the armory then; leave 'em in a pile and let Heero and Wufei grab them if they need them." I looked around for a good place to put them and finally settled on the platform with the radio on it and ditched the ammo along with them, although I kept the bag I'd grabbed. "You're taking a break from talking into the Magical Box of Get Help?" I asked.

"Yes. My voice was fading out from constantly talking, so I decided to take a break and show everyone how to make some traps. I thought they might come in handy."

"It's a good idea. The traps are working surprisingly well; I pulled both those weapons off of already dead people, and I never ran into any living ones. Of course, given the size of this island that's not really surprising. I never ran into Heero, Trowa, or Wufei either. We need some sort of signal or way to find each other if we need to." I gave a half grin. "Wandering around like an idiot just isn't working."

"You should have thought of that earlier, it would have been more useful then," Wufei called sarcastically as he dropped into the clear area, a scruffy boy following him down in a less graceful half fall. Wufei was carrying several things slung over his shoulder, proof that I wasn't the only one going through dead people's stuff.

"Hey, you didn't think of it either!" I protested. "And none of us ever split up for this long before. This island's just too damn big."

"I'm not sure a signal's a good idea," Quatre broke in. "A noise would alert anyone nearby, as would any visual signal. I think the best idea may be to have everyone check in here at designated intervals. Then if one person needs to get in touch with another, they can leave a message."

"Uh…" I blinked. "Sounds like it'll work." Wufei nodded. I grinned. "Guess that makes you the answering machine, huh?"

Quatre made a face at me. "Should I make a beep noise then?"

"To be technically accurate, you should repeat an asinine message and then make a beep noise, but I think we can skip that." Wufei sighed. "I actually came back to bring Rick in; he doesn't have the stamina to keep moving for this long. He can join your trap-making crew, and while I'm here I can take a few traps with me to set." We all looked over at Rick, who had apparently decided that parking his butt on the ground was a good idea and was quickly picking up the trick to knotting vines together.

I blinked as I got my brain back in gear. "Ah, while you're here, I ran into three dead guys. One had already been stripped, two hadn't, and the guns and ammo I pulled off 'em are over there." I gestured towards the platform.

Wufei eyed my knives and shrugged philosophically. "I suppose it's best to stick with what you know."

I rolled my eyes. Duh. "Keeping track of the baddies still alive in the woods is probably a good idea. How many do you know are dead? The body I found that was already stripped was in a noose trap about two hours thataway." I pointed.

Wufei shook his head. "Not one I tracked." He pulled a sack and a shotgun off his back as he talked. "I know three perished immediately at the beach before they figured out we had trapped the woods. There were, however, too many others around to search the bodies. I followed one of the more adept hunters in and used stealth to knock him into a spiked pit once he was far enough from the rest of the group to not alert them with noise. I took his gear with me." He hefted the sack and handed it to Quatre. "There should be some useful things in there."

Wufei backed up until he could sit on a squiggly bit of tree. I was guessing Rick wasn't the only one who needed a break. "Unfortunately," he continued, "I believe they're getting smarter. I managed to pick off one other straggler I ran into by chance, but other than that the sweep I made to try to find any more hunters got me nowhere. They're good enough not to leave tracks, and, as Duo pointed out, the island's just too damned big."

While Wufei had been talking, Quatre had been going through the bag he'd been handed. "Ah ha!" He pulled out what looked like a sketchbook.

"Who the hell takes a sketchbook on a maniacal hunting spree?"

"Does it matter, Duo? Keeping track of how many hunters are out there is a good idea, and it will be easier if I have something to write in." He detached a pencil from the side of the book and flipped it open. It took some turning to find a blank page; whoever the book belonged too, they weren't a bad artist. Emphasis on the past tense. I derailed that train of thought. "Duo found three dead, Wufei can account for five, so there are six more out there. Heero and Trowa may have taken some out though. And we shouldn't discount the boats; the people left on them may get involved at some point."

I snorted. "So there's at least four enemies unaccounted for and possibly a whole bunch that we don't know about. Yay helpful."

"Actually," Wufei said speculatively, "assuming no one has moved from the boats to the woods yet besides the hunters, we can fix that problem by setting a watch on the boats again."

"That's damned dangerous since they know we're here," I warned. "And it'd be too dangerous to send any of the new ones, they're not good enough in the trees yet."

Quatre nodded. "It would have to be one of the five of us, since we know the island and the traps well enough by now to run in an absolute emergency."

Wufei continued that train of thought. "Heero and Trowa are unreachable until they come back here, which is likely to be too long from now. Quatre, you're on radio duty since I don't trust Duo to not start cracking jokes and confusing the people on the other end−"

"Hey!"

"−and I'd prefer to be free to move." Both Quatre and Wufei looked at me expectantly. Did I have a "Pick Me for Lousy Jobs" sign on my forehead or something?

I rolled my eyes. "Fine, I'll go for now. But I vote we have shifts, that way anyone who needs a break from general mayhem can boat watch and whoever's on boat watch can get off before the monotony drives them bonkers." And by them I meant me. "Plus it's getting dark, and sleep would be a good thing that keeps people aware and not crazy, so I'd like to have some at some point tonight."

"That's fair," Quatre said. "We'll send whoever's available to spell you later."

I sighed theatrically. "Then I guess I get to go be bored out of my skull again. While at the same time having to stay alert constantly. Oh wait, that sounds like normal life. Well, except for the presence of guns and me being a specific target…uh." I stopped talking since I was getting an unreadable look from Wufei and a somewhat shocked one from Quatre. Okay, shouldn't have said that. I decided to switch the topic. "Before I take off, what do we want the designated check-in interval to be? For when I get off boring watch."

Wufei apparently decided to go with it. "Hm. Maybe five hours? That's enough time to cover a good chunk of the intermediate woods. If someone intends to go farther, say to the beach, they can say so when they check in and get a time extension."

Figures a police man would come up with the verbal version of overtime paperwork. Well, whatever worked. "'Kay. I'll go stare at the beach now. I'll use the place where we found Quatre. We put enough traps in that area that it should be pretty safe to stay in; anyone coming in from the ground would make a lot of noise and make themselves nice and obvious." I took one last opportunity to stretch my back out completely since I'd be traveling through and then sitting in trees for the next ten or so hours. I also grabbed some food from our stash to munch on the way. "Catch you all later." I waved back on my way out.