"Locke. You, of all people, should understand this. Why I have to go alone," Kate pleaded with him.
All eyes turned to the mysterious older man. "Kate, I see where you're coming from. It's just too dangerous. That thing out there is too dangerous. We can't afford to lose you."
A disoriented but relatively unharmed Claire had stumbled into the beach camp earlier that morning. She remembered nothing, but was noticeably no longer pregnant. The community's collective sigh of relief subsided abruptly when they realized something.
"Claire. Claire! Where's the baby?" Jack demanded after making sure she was okay.
"Baby?" Claire asked. "Who has a baby?" She smiled dreamily.
"Bloody hell!" Charlie cried out when he heard her words. "You can't mean to say…"
Jack interrupted. "Whoever did this to her, they must have drugged her. They only wanted her until they could have the child."
"Who would…do that?" Boone asked, disturbed.
"Someone who knows more about us than we know about them."
"Please, people! Look around you. Sickness. Sayid, Claire, Shannon, Sawyer, Charlie, they're all in no condition. It's all the others can do to keep up. Jack's the doctor! He's needed. Locke, to hunt for food. Michael's got a son of his own. Boone needs to stay with Shannon. The other survivors, they haven't been told enough of this to be called upon. I'm the only one. No connections, no one to go back to. Nothing to go back to." She paused. "Open your eyes, people!" Kate collapsed onto an outcropping of rocks. "I have to do something."
The group surveyed her in silence. Kate met the eyes of each successive person in the gathering. Michael. Jack. Sayid. Boone. Locke. Hurley. Charlie.
As she met no dissent, she grabbed her pack and pushed past the group, squinting as the late morning sun hit her face. She headed towards the treeline.
"Kate!" Pause. Locke ran up after her. Wordlessly he handed her a sheathed hunting knife, and turned away.
She clipped it to her cargo pants and forged on.
Sawyer sat dozing under his tarp, sunglasses on and Watership Down clasped loosely in his rough palms.
"Glad to see you're making yourself useful," the dry voice pierced the afternoon air.
"Can it, Tubby," Sawyer spat back at Hurley.
Ignoring him, Hurley went on. "But if you could spare a moment, we'd love to have someone to make a water run."
"Wait a golly-gee second there, partner," Sawyer said, his curiosity peaked as he cracked an eyelid. "Freckles is the water girl. Why don't you go bother her."
"You mean you don't know? I thought the news had pretty well worked its way through camp by now. I suppose people'd actually have to want to talk to you before you heard, though."
"Well, I do love a good gab session. Spit it out, McLard." His voice carried across the coast to Jack.
"I wouldn't have thought you cared, Sawyer. Kate left this morning to search for Claire's baby—oh, wait; you do know that Claire came back this morning, right? And Charlie's actually been back at camp a few days now!" Jack had just about had it with Sawyer's lack of effort to do anything. "Point is," he concluded, dropping the bag of empty water bottles into Sawyer's lap, "Kate's off looking for Claire's baby, of which we know neither gender nor age, potentially and likely confronting whatever it was that stole it from her. It gets better, Sawyer: she's by herself."
"Really now? Doctor Tarzan didn't feel like going wandering in the jungle with Jane?" He sneered. "Kate's a big girl, Jacko. She's obviously more put together than you are right about now, cowboy."
As Jack and Hurley turned and trudged back towards the caves, Sawyer shouted at their retreating backs, "Keep your pants on, Doc. She'll come home."
Later that night, Sawyer sat up while the rest of the island's inhabitants were dropping off to sleep. By the flickering light of his lighter, he wrote in a crinkly notebook he'd recovered from the fuselage.
"I am going to kick that little girl's ass all the way back to Australia when she gets back here. Crazy woman. What the hell'd she go alone for? That monster had better get to her first, or she'll wish it had—"
"Shit!" he yelled as the lighter's flame burned into his thumb. He dropped it into the sand and stuck his throbbing finger into his mouth. That's the last time he tries to write in the goddamn dark.
Not more than three miles away, Kate lay uncomfortably on a tree root, leaning against the base of the trunk. No way was she sleeping out here, alone. Not when some psychotic baby-stealer was on the loose. She was just taking a break. She shivered. Building a fire would draw undesired attention to her location. Just had to wait out the last few hours of the night.
Jack was slowly going insane. Everyone wanted to know about Claire, and Kate, and the baby. The only thing no one was asking about was the someone, or someones, who had taken the infant and carelessly dumped off its helpless, memoryless, post-natal mother. No one wanted to know that. Not even Jack did.
He stalked through the jungle, towards the place he had been told was right for the sacrifice. The infant girl he had silenced, good old-fashioned chloroform. His client had told him the baby should be conscious for the ceremony, but it made such a hellish racket that unconscious would just have to do. Coming to the designated clearing, he set the infant child on the stump in the grassy center. Taking the hatchet lying next to it, he mumbled the ridiculous mumbo-jumbo his client had crazily ordered. Raising the weapon over his head, he suddenly brought it down. A sickly snap, the thunk of the hatchet embedded in the stump, then silence.
A stricken Kate straightened from her crouch behind a neighboring tree, unseen by the killer, and didn't stop running until she met the ocean. Crouching down, she wept and vomited away the pain until dehydration overtook her and she passed out of consciousness.