Part Eleven
The sun was hanging low on the horizon, and Shannon did not know where she was. This would not be so bad under normal circumstances unless she was wandering around the jungle by herself, but she had the sneaking suspicion that Sayid did not know where he was, either. There was only one mental category that she could file that little revelation under: Very Bad. When she thought of all the creepy mojo and Apocalypse Now antics that had been going on on Craphole Island all day long, and Shannon even thought that another 'Very' might be in order.
She wrapped her arms around herself, watched the back of Sayid's neck as he strode a few paces ahead of her, and asked herself for perhaps the millionth time since they had started out just what she thought she was doing. She was not a hero. This was not a thought shot through with self-condemnation; with rare exception, Shannon was not the sort of girl who spent hours staring into her navel and contemplating all of her past wrongs. This happened, she coped with them, and it didn't do anyone any good, including herself, if she couldn't pick herself up and keep moving afterwards. She could be nice-well, she could-but she was never going to be selfless, not in the way that Jack could and she thought that Kate wanted to be, where she completely forgot that an individual person with distinct needs was even there. It just wasn't in the programming, and Shannon was nothing if she hadn't made herself into a realist.
And all of that still did nothing to help her figure out what she was doing there, traipsing along through a patch of jungle that she had never seen before behind Sayid and the other scary Army guy. They were the only two carrying guns, having left the other two back at the caves just in case something happened. Shannon was kind of getting the feeling that she and the other two had been allowed along on this trip only because Sayid was too much of a gentleman to turn down willing hands when they were in short supply. Shannon wasn't sure that she disagreed with his assessment, either, and had to wonder what she was trying to prove here, who she thought she was proving it to.
She dropped her hands back to her sides and heaved a sigh loud enough to make Sayid pause and look back at her with raised eyebrows and a concerned expression. Scary Army Guy halted in his steps as well, giving Shannon the look that he had been flashing her all afternoon, the one that asked her what she thought she was doing there. As Shannon had seen him flashing a similar one to the other two on more than one occasion, she curled her lip slightly and decided that she was not going to let it get to her.
"Are you all right, Shannon?" Sayid asked.
Shannon realized that everyone was staring at her by this point. She normally preferred to be holding court for more flattering reasons. "I'm fine," she said. When Sayid continued to look at her in that steady, unshakeable way that he had, she added, "Really, I'm okay. Just, um…" There was no way that she could say this without looking like the wee socialite who could not hold her own when she was placed on a mission with real importance. Shannon paused, mouth snapping shut, before she felt a line of liquid steel being injected into her vertebra. And when had she ever given a damn about what someone else thought of her? Not for years, at least. She lifted her chin. "It's getting dark. Didn't we say that we were going to be back by then?"
Army Guy exchanged a glance with Sayid that Shannon supposed was meant to be one of commiseration. She could count on both hands all the ways in which she did not care. Sayid, however, was giving her that look again, the one that she had never received from any man before him. It was a look that Shannon alternately loved and loathed, because it made Shannon feel as if Sayid was somehow staring into the core of her and finding something in there better than she even thought she could be, something that he could not look away from.
After a long pause, Sayid nodded. "Come here, Shannon." He gestured her forward, then pointed at a place on a nearby tree just about level with her chin. "Do you see this?"
Shannon leaned forward to look where Sayid indicated, bracing her hand against his shoulder to steady herself. He gripped her wrist until she found her balance again and did not let go again for several seconds. Shannon shook off the pleasurable gooseflesh that wanted to roll over her and touched the deep gouges in the bark that she had not noticed until Sayid pointed them out to her. Now that she was seeing them, she wondered how she ever could have missed them. Shannon slid her forefinger into the marks and watched as it disappeared up to the first knuckle. The edges of the gouges were charred, making them much darker than the surrounding mark. Shannon drew her hand back and rubbed the sap against her fingers. "Did an animal do this?"
She could feel Sayid's curls brushing against her shoulder as he shook his head; the careful knot that he had placed his hair in had worked free within the first hour. Shannon had not realized until that point how close he was standing. "The polar bears might be tall enough to cause a mark this high up," he said. "But do you see these?" He reached out and touched the same burns that Shannon had noted a few moments before. "Unless we have a dragon running about, there is no way that an animal could have done this."
"On this island?" Shannon heard Scary Army Guy's friend asking from a few paces behind them. "I'll put ten dollars down right now that it's a dragon."
Sayid's lips turned up slightly, but his eyes never left Shannon's. "So it had to have been some kind of machine," Shannon finished, putting her fingers back into the gouges. She wasn't positive that she was not imagining it, but the sap still felt warm to her.
"We can still turn back," Sayid said. His tone was gentle. "We can get the rest of the camp, return in force."
Shannon rubbed the sap against her forefinger and thumb. She wasn't crazy, it was definitely still warm. How had something large enough to leave gouges that high on the tree managed to get through without any of them seeing or hearing anything? The voice of reason piped up in Shannon's head, saying that maybe Sayid was right, maybe now was the time for all of them to back off and think things over.
"No," Shannon said after a long internal debate with herself. She set her jaw. "We have guns-" 'So did Sawyer.' "-and they might still be close. If we find out where the Others are, then we can come back with more people, but there's no guarantee that we'll get this trail again." She might not be a hero, but the kid had trusted her with his dog. Back in the real world, most people didn't even trust her to watch the remote control.
Sayid squeezed her shoulder. Shannon thought that she even detected pride in the gesture. "Come on." He thumbed the safety off on his gun. A few paces away, Scary Army Guy did the same thing.
"Do you need any help carrying your pack?" Matthew whispered to her. It was the third time that he had asked since they had started out. His Midwestern accent grew even thicker when he spoke to her, and it was only about once every thirty seconds that he managed to meet her gaze.
Shannon rolled her eyes and stared straight ahead, managing to keep herself from sighing only through an extreme act of will. She thought that she saw Sayid casting an amused glance her way. If the situation had not been so serious she would have run over and socked him one in the arm for it.
"No, Matthew, I think I can manage my ten pound backpack," she said wearily. Off of Matthew's briefly hurt look, she added. "But thank you for asking. Again." Six weeks ago she would not have done even that much, and probably would have thrown in a few scathing remarks besides. Shannon preferred to think of it as personal growth. She stepped up close to Sayid's side so that she could twine her fingers into his free hand.
"Hey," Scary Army Guy's friend-was his name Bill? Shannon hadn't bothered to ask-spoke up a moment later, "does anyone else smell that?" Matthew took a step sideways and looked at him warily, but he insisted, "No, I'm serious. It smells like…motor oil?"
Shannon was ready to roll her eyes in the same way that she had at Matthew a few moments before and throw in a few mean remarks besides, when out of nowhere she thought that she smelled something, too. She had never deliberately smelled motor oil or even placed herself in a mechanic's garage where she could catch a whiff of it firsthand, but she could remember when Boone had been a sophomore and she had been a freshman, when the boy ritual of being able to tinker around with a car had become all-important. God, she had laughed at him, asking what the hell the rich boy thought he was trying to prove, pretending to be a mechanic when everyone at the school knew that he could just buy a new car pretty much every time that he wanted one. Shannon's stomach clenched as she remembered it. She had been unable to dance due to a hamstring injury, she had been feeling particularly depressed and useless all that winter, and Sabrina had been in fine form, but that was not an excuse. The way that Boone's clothes had smelled every time that he came back inside, though, had been the same.
For a moment they all stared at one another, four deer in the light of an oncoming car that none of them could even really see, let alone hope to dodge. The silence was clear and wrenching, and from far off Shannon thought that she could hear the sound of water running.
Then the birds began to scream and the trees began to shake, and these were sounds that they had all been trained in a very short amount of time to have strong reactions to.
Sayid jerked as if he had been struck by electricity. "It's coming!" he yelled, a ferocity in his voice that made Shannon feel as if she had just been given a good zap with the taser, too. She twitched and covered her mouth and nose with her hand as the smell of grease and machines that had been no more than a hint on the air a few seconds before now swelled to become overpowering. Every breath that she drew felt like Jello being sucked down her lungs, and from the corner of her eye she saw Matthew lean over and begin retching. A wire-thin trail of saliva ran from his lower lip to the ground. "Get under cover, everyone!" Sayid pulled hard at Shannon's arm when she did not move quickly enough to satisfy him, gesturing to Matthew with the hand that still held the gun. The youth shook his head and, swiping at his mouth, ran over to join them, while Scary Army Guy and his buddy bolted off in the other direction.
Sayid did not wait for Matthew to reach them before he whirled around and dove into the underbrush. Over her own panicked wheezings and the sound of her feet and heart pounding in time, Shannon could hear Matthew running only a few yards behind her. The trees all around them were shaking now; leaves fell down to catch in Shannon's hair as she dashed beneath the branches. 'Why isn't the ground shaking?' Shannon thought with a surreal kind of clarity, like a snapshot taken slightly out of focus. There was no time to wonder about that now, or about much of anything else except for moving those legs that had served her so well on the dance stage and had had track coaches eyeballing her from the age of twelve to eighteen. Her breath rasped in her throat. 'Oh, Jesus, not now, not now, you can have an attack any time but now.'
Shannon felt rather than heard the trees directly behind her parting in the face of some incredible force. The loudest sound in her ears was the roaring noise created by her own blood rushing by. When Shannon opened her mouth to scream, the only sound that could find the air to emerge was a high, breathless whistle. She did not need to pause or turn her head to know that Matthew would not be behind them any longer if she looked.
"Don't, Shannon," Sayid panted from beside her, timing the words to sync up with the pattern of his steps. "Don't look, there is nothing there that you need to see."
It was excellent advice, and Shannon intended to follow it to the letter. She hated splatter films, Boone had used to torture her about it mercilessly, she couldn't even look at a raw chicken breast without feeling queasy-
Something hot and wet splattered against Shannon's pack, against the back of her neck and into her hair, and Shannon's ailing lungs found that they could draw in the oxygen for a good, long scream, after all. Shannon didn't give in to the urge to pause for an Oscar-worthy freak out, tempting though it was, knowing that if she did so it would likely be her last. Her lungs and legs continued to burn, but she clenched Sayid's hand hard enough to leave barely-traceable bruises across the skin later and ran on.
Shannon did not watch horror films, one of the only notes of conformity that she failed to hit with the popular crowd during her entire high school career. If she had, she likely would have been far more exasperated with herself when he toe caught on a tree root and dragged her straight down to the ground. There was nothing that Shannon despised more than being a cliché. She hit the ground with an 'Oof' noise and felt all of the air rushing from her lungs. He hand was dragged from Sayid's.
Shannon rolled over onto her backside and scrabbled backwards, already feeling herself start to go bug-eyed with terror. She anticipated golden eyes and long, slavering fangs, all of those things that she could build in her imagination but not stand to see on the big screen. What she did not expect to see was a swarm.
"What?" Shannon gasped, all of the fear momentarily shocked out of her. Huge as the great black cloud was, it paused as well, as if it was startled to actually be seen. Or maybe it was just pausing so that it could savor the moment.
'This is why I don't watch horror movies,' Shannon thought in another one of those eerie Polaroid moments. 'I can come up with much better on my own.' Sayid's hands appeared beneath her arms, scaring her so badly that she leapt off of the ground without his help. He was still holding the gun, Shannon noticed, though he seemed to have forgotten that it was there. "Why don't you shoot it?"
"Shoot at which part?" Sayid fired back. He jerked her backwards against his chest at the same moment that the monster, monsters, whatever, grew tired of feasting its eyes and lunged forward to feast…wherever the hell its mouths were. Dirt sprayed up from the place where Shannon had been crouching only a second before and stung her face. "This way!" Sayid started to tug her forward.
"No!" Shannon balked, aware as she did so that every second she wasted could be the last one that they had. Sayid stared at her as if he could actually see her taking her sanity from her head and setting it down on the ground. "I heard water!"
As Shannon watched, the lights went on behind Sayid's eyes. He nodded, Shannon reclaimed his hand, and off they went. The monster uprooted a tree directly behind them, sending branches and bark flying everywhere. Shannon shrieked as splinters peppered her shoulders and the backs of her legs. As they scrambled to get out of the path of further shrapnel, Shannon could not escape the feeling that the thing, whatever it turned out to be, was throwing things at them deliberately. The thought that it might be intelligent was the most frightening one of all.
"Where did you hear the water?" Sayid yelled at her, still barely audible over the din that was taking place half a step behind them.
"I…" Shannon fought back an urge to falter to a stop and spin around until she got her bearings back, knowing that if she paused now she was going to get them both killed. So long as they were moving, regardless of the direction that they were actually going in, all of their major body parts were going to stay where they belonged for a little while longer.
But it was so dark, and with the adrenaline rushing through her body and making all of her perceptions seem acidic and out of focus, Shannon could no longer be certain that she had heard anything at all. She set her jaw. 'Freak out later.' Shannon had the feeling that she was making one hell of a promise to herself with that one. 'Focus now.' "I think it's this way." Shannon tugged Sayid along with her in a new direction, leaping over a fallen log that she could barely see in the gloom but would have broken her ankles if she had collided with it all the same. The monster, which had until that point been hanging a few paces behind, lunged forward in earnest pursuit again. Whether it had been toying with them or attempting to herd them, Shannon discovered that she did not want to know.
When her foot struck something soft and yielding in the dark, Shannon found that she had the breath left in her for one more scream, after all. She broke contact with Sayid long enough to leap sideways, feeling her hand collide with a tree that she saw as no more than a dim silhouette in the dark. Her ring finger broke like a pencil in the hands of a careless child and the pain was bright, brilliant, and threw her mind into a clarity that she had never experienced before. Shannon clutched her hand to her chest and made a soft, wounded rabbit sound, too shocked to even scream again. She had a feeling that they had found out what had happened to Scary Army Guy and his buddy after they had split away.
"I can hear the water!" Sayid yelled, grabbing at Shannon's arm to get her moving again. She gasped as her newly broken finger was jarred, sending fresh agonies rolling all the way into her shoulder. Sayid shifted into a more gentle grip in response, but there was no time to slow down.
There was a tremendous splintering sound and a gust of air from behind them as the monster came down on the exact place where Sayid's voice had been coming from only a second before. Shannon felt like laughing, if she could have found the room for it around her wheezing. So the thing was not infallible. Thank God; Shannon had began to feel as if they were being pursued by an amorphous version of the Terminator.
They burst out the cover of the trees into clear moonlight at last. A pond of water about one hundred yards in diameter glittered before them, fed by one stream while the excess water tumbled away over a cliff in another. It was the sound of the waterfall that had led them there, and Shannon thought that it was a small miracle that they had not run right over the edge of the cliff in their mad dash. Shannon's heart constricted in her chest, one small spasm of grief that she could not afford but could also not avoid.
The feeling of those Godawful things wrenching at her backpack, trying to pull her right off of her feet, was as effective as a slap to the face in getting her focused again. Rather than lunging forward in a blind panic, Shannon twisted like an eel, leaving the backpack behind with a speed that would have had the basketball coaches giving her eyes right along with the track coaches if they had been there to see it. She looked over her shoulder and was treated to the bizarre sight of her pack dangling in the air without her body in it, held up by the black cloud. She snapped her head back around and used the last bit of her energy in following Sayid towards the water.
Shannon dove beneath the pool's surface headfirst just as her old diving instructor had once told her, using her hands to part the water so that she could slide through it like a knife. Her injured finger was bent back at an angle that nature had never intended it by the force with which she struck the water, blackening Shannon's vision and causing her to suck water down into her lungs as she tried to cry out. She bobbed back to the surface, coughing and sputtering. Sayid was treading water only a few feet away. One side of his face was rapidly growing dark with blood from a cut in his cheek that Shannon had not noticed over the course of their mad dash. In the cold moonlight, it looked as if he had tar welling up from his skin.
"Sayid," Shannon gasped, paddling the few remaining feet over to him. Every movement of her hand brought fresh tears of pain into her eyes.
Sayid turned a wide-eyed, alarmed gaze onto her when he heard the sound of her voice. "Shannon, be quiet!" he hissed, as Shannon realized that that terrible buzzing sound was filling the air again. She took a deep breath and ducked beneath the surface of the water. Looking up through the scant moonlight that came down through the water, Shannon was able to watch as the light broke into a thousand stars when the monster struck the surface of the water and then skimmed away again. 'It can't dive in after me,' Shannon thought. The horrible thing had so few other weaknesses that they had seen thus far, so she clung to this one for all that she was worth.
Shannon lurked beneath the surface until her lungs were burning and dark spots were dancing in front of her eyes before cautiously swimming back up to the surface. Sayid was treading water a few feet away again, his hair wet as if he too had dove beneath the surface when the thing struck. He swam over to Shannon's side and rubbed at her back as she tried to control the sound of her wheezing. "It's all right," he told her in a voice that nevertheless did not rise above a whisper. "I don't think that it will come close to the water again. It knows now that it can't."
"You mean that it's smart?" Shannon gasped. Even though she had been wondering about that herself, it sounded worse when Sayid said it. A dark black cloud hovered about a dozen feet above the surface of the water. She could not shake the feeling that it was waiting.
"I think it may be." Sayid put his arm around Shannon's shoulders and pulled her as close as he was able while still allowing them both to tread water. Shannon reached out with her good hand and swiped a small, struggling thing from the water, holding it close so that she could see it in the small amount of light filtering through the clouds that had begun to pile up in the sky above them. She stared at a robotic thing slightly larger than her own thumb, perhaps as large as Sayid's, barrel-shaped and with a series of rotating, teeth-like blades on either end. Shannon let out a cry of pain and disgust as one of the teeth bit into her finger and dropped the little abomination into the water, where it disappeared from sight. She stuck her wounded digit into her mouth.
"That's one mystery solved, at least," Sayid muttered, staring up at the clouds. His hand tightened around Shannon's shoulders. Shannon was not sure that he was even aware of the gesture.
"Are we stuck here until it gets bored?" Shannon asked, snuggling closer to Sayid.
"I think we might be," Sayid answered. His hand tightened again.
From far off in the jungle, bobbing points of light could be seen.
Sawyer stood on the far shore, shrouded by trees that blocked even the sparsest amounts of moonlight from reaching him. They shivered in an out of focus from one moment to the next, letting Sawyer know that he was in another one of his fun dreamscapes. Gosh, but the first one had been such a laugh riot, how could it be that he was failing to be amused by the second one?
He folded his arms over his chest and felt a deep frown line drawing itself between his eyes as he watched Shannon and Sayid struggle out on the water. The smell of motor oil was still heavy and thick on the air. "Nice light show," he said to the blue-eyed female thing standing beside him. Boone was not present. "You should direct movies. Doesn't mean that you ain't just making it up, though, or that it will do you a damned bit of good in roping me into your little game." Sawyer parted his lips into a dangerous smile. "I'm a touch twitchy about being manipulated these days, but I'm sure that you already know about all of those sticky little details. Go talk to Baldy, he seems kind of into it, though."
"You have to give one back. They'll all die if you don't, including that boy, and don't you think you've done enough of that?" While Sawyer sucked in his breath sharply, the female thing folded her arms over her chest and stared him down. "Get off your ass," she said coldly.
End Part Eleven
