Disclaimer: Nothing "Lost" is mine, alas.

Survival

This is my third morning alone on the sand.

Every day has been the same. I wake up from half sleep as the sun is rising. I spend the day walking fifty meters up and down the beach.

No farther.

I have not seen anyone else from the team since they left. It is as though the Jungle has swallowed them. I am sorry they didn't listen to me from the start, when we heard the transmission with the endless numbers. But I was democratically overruled.

It is on their own heads.


It has been a week since they left. My rations are almost gone. I am sure the team expected me to scamper to the Forrest with the first pangs of hunger. By now, they wonder if they underestimated me. Perhaps they plan on sending a peace offering when I will be too weak to refuse. So predictable, my longtime companions.

Fools.

I should be worried. Someone else would panic, I am sure. I have five centimeters of water left, and two ounces of beurre d'arachide. Tomorrow, I will have nothing.

How can I be so impossibly calm? Fate is running her fingers through my hair, but I feel no fear. Not even sorrow.

I am... curious.

I am excited.


Last night, I dreamed.

I dreamed that I was whispering through the Jungle. I moved fluidly, gracefully, as if I were silence herself. Vigor and life laced through limbs that were not quite corporeal. I did not know where I was going or why I was now allowed within the Jungle.

But I knew I has a purpose there, so I continued flying.

Until I saw the bunker.

It had been built haphazardly of the remnants of our ship, the battered strips of iron welded loosely together. There were old nails and crude wooden fastenings as well, but in my dreaming I saw what held the shelter together in truth.

Fear.

Stealthily, brimming with a glee that was only partly my own, I slid through the outer wall and into the partion where my once-comrades slept uneasily. They had set Robert as a sentinel, but I was hardly spirit by then and undetectable. Disdain was sour in my mouth for these ridiculous men and women who thought they knew nature, who thought themselves infallible.

They, and their children as well.

I went to Alex.

He had always been a beautiful child, but the time on the Island had imbued him with a wild, luminous aura that I could feel even as he slept. Only he, of the entire expedition slept peacefully anymore. This was a wonderful game for him, an outlet for the raw, savage talents society could not answer. He had been prepared.

The game was over.

I had dimly wondered if it would be difficult, or even how I would go about it. But I didn't even have to think. Alex exhaled softly, and I seized my opportunity.

There it was, the thread of his soul floating just beyond his lips. Before the boy could breathe again, I seized the gossamer strand and pulled.

I was flying through the Jungle to deliver my prize, driven by a need I did not understand...

...but the sun was kissing my face and I lay quite still on the ragged blanket over the sand.

In time, they whispered.