XX: Ain't That Pretty at All
Sawyer's grin only widens. He nods Desmond at the body, his eyes on the other man. Some glorified janitor's easier to look at than a decapitated corpse. "Maybe your buddy was the Headless Horseman, only without a horse. Maybe he got here on his own. A shark took his head - chomp! - and the rest of him walked here on his own."
"Shut up, you damned idiot," Desmond says, almost lackadaisically, and moves for his pistol again. The dog-tags are dropped next to Kelvin's body.
Sawyer can't exactly blame him, but neither can he resist egging on the other man a little. "Maybe he'll get up and walk again. Dance a little Irish jig. It'd be a hell of a sight."
The body does not get up and move towards them, nor, disappointingly enough, does it dance. Sawyer half-suspects it might actually reanimate itself, but he figures telling this to Desmond in a serious manner might not be the best course. Crazy people don't need his encouragement to be even crazier, after all. Nonetheless, he can't help but stare at the headless body for a long, long time even after his wisecracks, feeling strangely transfixed. Perhaps it's alive. Perhaps it's a trick. Whatever it is, it proves there's something else – someone else – on the island, and that they're close, and that they know where we are.
The thought feels strange, though. If they've been watching, then this whole thing was a setup, and that feels oddly betraying. They could have been saved all this while, and so whatever they might have tried to do was a wasted effort. The journey on the raft itself was a waste, and it only got them in deeper trouble. If only he had known that. He wouldn't have agreed to help those idiots out, then. Not one bit.
So as it is, he hangs out there, staring for a few long moments at the body, before something other than a joke comes to his lips. "So, what do we do now?" He indicates a path forking from the clearing. "Left or right? Or do we stay here and wait 'til they come for us, too? I mean, they've got to know that we'd head this way. So they have to know we're here. So if you want to wait here with Vic Morrow, be my guest. Me, I'm taking off."
He starts for the path to the right, between two avocado trees, grabbing one of the hanging fruits as he goes, but something stops him. It's not Desmond, who does not even move, from what Sawyer's peripheral vision and his hearing tell him. It's not anything specific, really. All that it is is a flat, hissing sound, but it piques his curiosity, making him stop and listen. Just as he's dreaded, the hissing works its way into undulations, the sound starting to swirl, and then the waves of noise start to form specific sounds. Syllables. Words.
"… It'll come back around."
Sawyer feels his face tighten, forces it into a grin, even laughs, although it sounds hollow to him. "Funny," he tells the path ahead, shaking his head. "Not buying it twice in a row." He buffs the avocado on his shirt, sliding it into his pocket. It'll ripen later. "I grew out of ghost stories when I was ten. You know, whoever you are, you may want to come out, or Bono here will shoot you. He's a good shot, I'll bet. Well, aside from hitting your computer, but I reckon bygones can be bygones." He glances back to Desmond to see if his guess is right. He's pleased to see that it is.
"Stop talkin' about them, or they'll come out!" Desmond's voice is somewhere between pleading and exasperated.
"Wow. You really think so? I never would have guessed, considering I just told them, 'Come out.' " Sawyer glances back down the path, and he can see something – just up ahead, just out of range of his eyesight – moving. Adrenaline courses through him, and he moves past the avocado trees, thinking, I really shouldn't be doing this. I should be back there in the clearing, not stalking after ghosts or Ewoks or whatever the hell they are.
"Idiot," Desmond repeats, closer now and sounding more disgusted with him. At least I've got some accompaniment now, and with a firearm to boot, Sawyer thinks. "We're goin' the wrong way, and you're not gonna find anything good down this way."
He tries to make the question sound as offhanded as he can. "How do you know? You know what they are. You know where they are. So what gives?" He keeps walking, although his pace is slower now, each section of words a deliberate step. The whispering picks up again, and he adds, "What is that, anyway? I've been hearin' that for a few weeks now, and you didn't even say a word when I talked back to it. So you hear it too." His pulse pounds in his arms and throat, and his mouth feels dry. "Answers, Desmond. Now."
"I can't give them to you."
"Can't or won't?"
"Can't," Desmond asserts. He lifts the pistol from its path, bringing it to bear on Sawyer again. "If you want to be healed, you're gonna have to trust me."
"Trust a freak who shanghais me from a place where I was perfectly comfortable, shoots me up with drugs, and likes waving a pistol around in my face," Sawyer tosses back despite himself. It only occurs to him a moment or two later that maybe this might not be the best thing to say. And all the while, those whispers keep getting louder, drumming into his brain with the force of some sort of witch-doctor chant. "That's a hell of a way to create trust. And no way. We're going to find out what this is, and if it's the wrong damn path, then it's the wrong damn path. At least I'll die happy."
Desmond becomes more agitated, sounding yet more urgent. The gun waves a bit more wildly, and Sawyer tenses, doing his best to watch the man's face. That's a better giveaway than his hands that he's going to shoot. Sawyer's been in enough tense situations to know that.
Sawyer has also heard enough babbling that, at first, the man's words evoke a weary sense of sameness: "This is a trick. It's in the manuals. I know it. See, man, it's a trap. We can't go this way, because if we go this way, they've got somethin' here, man, punji sticks, and there's poison on them, and they'll kill you or make you get amputated within a few hours. You think that bullet wound is bad – you ever seen anyone after one of those things gets jabbed into them? It ain't a pretty sight."
Sawyer stops short. He's not sure if it's the mention of the trap or the threat of death that makes him stop, but he doesn't move any further forward. "That's a military thing. Those dog-tags were military. We're on a base."
He watches Desmond's face to see if some flicker of agrement, some involuntary affirmation, crosses the man's face, but none does. Desmond only shakes his head sadly, lowering his pistol by an increment or two. "I wish you were right, man." He gestures Sawyer backwards with the gun, and Sawyer obeys for once. He's out of his league with death traps around him, at least until he can feel a bit better and get his hands on a gun.
"OK, we're not on a base. So what's the manual about?" Sawyer takes another step, too, feeling his head start to swim. "And why'd you get to read the damn thing and we didn't? I would have loved to know the plot before they dropped us off here, believe me."
A strangely downcast turn to Desmond's voice: "There is no plot anymore. They gave up the plot a long time ago, Kelvin says."
"Plot to what?" Sawyer says.
"Now that, I won't tell you." For once, Desmond sounds like he's not going to brook an argument on that topic, and though every fiber of his body wants to argue with this, to question Desmond further, to find out just what he knows and how much he knows it, Sawyer can't run the risk of antagonizing the guy any further if the antagonism won't produce results. Desmond's got the drugs that make his shoulder feel better and keep his head clear, and the gun that could possibly keep both of them alive. So why burn that bridge without a good cause?
They shuffle back to the clearing, that gun waving around all the while, and Sawyer calculates at least four times in the move whether he can grab the pistol out of the guy's hands. Each time, he decides against it. The whispering ceases as soon as they spill into the break in the trees, and he gets a better – or worse, as the case may be – eyeful of Kelvin's corpse. He also gets a glimpse of those dog-tags that Desmond had isolated, and he carefully moves his hand for them, fingers touching metal. The last time he'd grabbed dog-tags, he'd had a crazy guy pull a gun on him, and he expects the same crazy guy to threaten him with the same gun again. This time, however, Desmond does not seem to notice, and Sawyer slides the tags into his pocket.
"So, we're taking the left-hand path, then. Are there traps there?"
"Maybe." Desmond doesn't sound too concerned. "We're not taking that path, though."
"What the hell are we doing, then?"
"Staying here for a few more minutes, 'til dusk. A path will open up then. It's only accessible at dusk, the manual said." Desmond sounds entirely convinced of this, so much so that Sawyer actually believes it himself, for a half-second, before he snickers. The laughter doesn't earn him a friend, to say the least. Instead, it earns him a glare. "Look, man, without me, you'd be lyin' there on that bed, maybe even have lost an arm. So you aren't in a position to distrust me, y'know?"
Some help the guy's been to him, though. All Desmond's done is drag him out here. His arm's not getting better from this journey. It's stopped hurting, but it hasn't healed any. Sawyer doesn't say that. Instead, he says, "So why are you bringing me out here to get healed, then? Nobody grabbed that kid Boone when he went down in the airplane. He wasn't worth much, but I ain't either."
"You can hear 'em. Not all of you can. That's why. They talk, and you guys can hear them. That's worth saving."
The simplicity of the explanation startles him. He thinks, All I hear is that guy Duckett, but decides it's better not to explain that to Desmond. If the guy starts thinking of him as expendable, he just might die all too soon. Better to let the lunatic think he's invaluable, as long as he's not asked to prove it. Instead, he adds, "You can hear them too. They had you. So what do they need us for?"
Something passes over Desmond's face that Sawyer can only label as a haunted look. No words come with it, though. Instead, Desmond gives Kelvin's body a final look, and then moves off to the right. He doesn't head to the path, though. Instead, he heads further to the side of it, lifting up a few tree branches to expose another path. Whereas what they've been traveling on has been dirt, hard-packed earth that looks rarely traveled, what Desmond has revealed is hard and black and tarred. It takes Sawyer a few moments to realize what it is, and when he does, it shocks him. It's pavement.
"Christ," Sawyer breathes, staring. He's half-shocked at the sight, and half-shocked at the fact that his long sojourn in the wilderness has left him unable to recognize even one of the most mundane signs of real civilization. "Where the hell does that lead to?"
"The main facilities," Desmond replies. "Where they must have taken off Kelvin's head."
"Who are 'they'? And facilities for what?"
He receives no answer but a genial wave of the gun, beckoning him on. It feels insane, but what choice does he have? Sawyer shakes his head, exhales slowly, and steps forward on the path, casting a sharp eye out for other signs of weirdness. What they would need to drive trucks out to some lone clearing for, I'll never know. He wishes he had his wits about him more, but curiosity compels him to keep moving, and he starts down the path, his booted steps scuffing on the hard surface as he goes.
Already, when they're halfway down the road, Sawyer hears them, the sounds those of heavy industry. Vehicles whir. The air becomes heavy. Machinery roars in precise intervals. He recognizes those sounds. "It isn't a hospital," he says aloud, although his company offers no reply. "It's a power plant. The heart of the island. Goddamn."