Set during 'The Hunter.' Brief mention is made of a conversation occurring during 'Love Me, Love My Skipper.'
OoOoOoO
Running. Running until his breath was coming in short, agonized gasps and the stitch in his side threatened to tear him in two. Running as sweat soaked through his clothes and dripped into his eyes. The world had contracted into two things—the need to run and the certainty that the thing he was running from was right there, no more than a pace or two behind him. Running, hard and hopeless.
Running until the prospect of being gunned down was almost preferable.
He stopped, checked his watch. Four hours and eleven minutes. That meant there were still almost twenty hours to go, and after those twenty hours, Kinkaid was going to kill everyone else. It was up to him to save his friends, because the Professor was right; six did outweigh one. He couldn't just keep running like a scared rabbit… and he physically couldn't keep running much longer, anyway. That meant he had to think. He had to come up with a plan. He had to be smart.
…And he had to get rid of his shirt, because wearing bright red was a really, really bad way to hide from a crazed gunman. He wriggled out of it, then grinned.
OoOoOoO
The other six castaways, sitting silently in a makeshift jail with Ramoo scowling at them, had long since run out of reassurances for one another. A gunshot cracked, somewhere in the distance.
"Maybe he missed," Mrs. Howell said. "Thurston, darling, you know how hard it is to hit anything with one of those dreadful rifles."
He patted her hand. And lied. "Indeed, Lovey. The boy's so skinny that there's hardly anything to hit. I'm sure he's all right."
OoOoOoO
Kinkaid had followed what was, in retrospect, a somewhat suspiciously clear trail to a tall, slim tree. Somewhat hidden in the crown of foliage, he could just see a flash of what looked like either Gilligan or a large scarlet coconut, and with no further ado, he had taken aim and fired. He had not missed.
All that fell out of the tree, however, was a familiar red shirt, stuffed with leaves and propped up on a piece of bamboo. Surprised, he stared at it for a moment, then a grudging smile spread across his face. "A decoy! Well done, Gilligan," he murmured. "Better than I expected."
Gilligan, meanwhile, had backtracked to a cove. The tide was just going out, which had left the sand damp and perfectly smooth. He turned around, then ran backwards across the beach and back into the jungle on the opposite side, leaving a chain of neat, clear footprints going in the wrong direction. He had done the same thing in several other places, trying to confuse his trail as much as possible. He needed Kinkaid to be confused. He needed to hide. He needed time.
And he needed a lot of vines. He pulled out his pocketknife and started hacking.
OoOoOoO
"I've never felt so helpless in my life," Mary Ann said.
"One good thing," the Professor pointed out. "We're still in here. That means that the hunt is still in progress."
"And that's good? Dear fellow, you've been in this dismal cave for too long," Mr. Howell said.
"It is good. It means that Gilligan made it through the night," he insisted, pitching his voice a bit louder than usual in hopes of reaching the Skipper, who had not budged from his self-imposed lookout at the bars of the cage since they had been locked in.
If the Skipper heard him, he never knew. Just then, there was a mad scramble at the edge of the clearing, and Gilligan himself, filthy and wild-eyed, emerged from the underbrush. For a moment, he stood still and looked desperately at them, apparently counting heads. That moment of distraction nearly proved fatal, when Kinkaid squeezed off a shot that missed by so minute a fraction of an inch that he could hear its whistle. He fell backwards, into the water trough, and lay still. The water clouded with red.
The Professor grabbed the Skipper, who had gone a deathly gray, and just in time, too.
Kinkaid approached the water trough, a glitter of unholy triumph in his eyes, which was abruptly quenched, literally as well as figuratively, when Gilligan lunged from the water and pulled him under. His left arm was bleeding, evidently grazed by the bullet, but he ignored it. His eyes flicked back to his friends for a moment, then he took off again, accompanied and warmed by their shouts of "Run, Gilligan! Run! Get away! Go, go, go!"
Some hours later, his rifle cleaned and reloaded, Kinkaid picked up the trail again. It was easier this time; his quarry was obviously nearing the end of his strength. Even without the trampled underbrush, bloody handprints adorned several trees, and it was not difficult to follow them to a shady clearing. A vine was stretched taut between two trees, and he rolled his eyes. "Oh, good heavens," he mocked. "I certainly hope that nothing bad will happen if I should happen to step on this completely non-suspicious vine. Your first try was better. Come on, Gilligan. We both know you're here, and you could at least have the spine to die on your feet, facing me like a man."
OoOoOoO
The castaways heard, somewhere in the distance, a crash. A scream. A gunshot. And then nothing.
OoOoOoO
Carefully, Kinkaid had stepped over the tripwire and into the clearing.
Onto the vine trigger hidden in the grass. The real one.
That trigger released a large log, which was only too happy to obey the law of gravity and land directly on Kinkaid, who screamed as he felt something important snap. The pain was all-encompassing, and terrifying, and not nearly as bad, somehow, as the numbness that followed hard on its heels.
Slowly, warily, Gilligan emerged from the underbrush. Kinkaid, panicked, called out to the man he'd been intending to kill mere moments before. "Gilligan! Gilligan, please—you've got to help me!"
Drawing nearer, Gilligan picked up the rifle that had fallen from the hunter's limp grasp, and looked at it for a moment, as if he'd never seen one before. And then he shouldered it with the unthinking competence of any ex-military man. He didn't favor his wounded left arm; if there was one good thing about tripping, falling, and running head-on into more or less every tree on the island, it was that it taught a person how to handle pain and keep on going. "Why would I want to do that?" he asked, with every indication of genuinely wanting to know the answer. His voice was jagged with pain and exhaustion, but calm as a summer sky.
"Please! I'm… get Ramoo. I'm hurt. I need to get to a hospital. I'll tell them where you are. You win. You'll be rescued, all of you. I swear it. Please!"
"Do you really think that I believe that you'd keep your word?" Gilligan repeated back to him, still calm, still distant. "Save the noble speeches for the movies. Where are the radio tubes?"
"In my pocket," Kinkaid grunted. "I think you shattered them while you were breaking my back."
"So it looks like only one of us has the spine to die on his feet after all," Gilligan said, mouth twisting into something that wasn't a smile. "Oh. Almost forgot. In the heart or between the eyes? You asked me, only fair I ask you."
"You have to help me," Kinkaid insisted. "You can't do this to me! I wouldn't really have shot you! Please! Help me, you have to! You're better than this! Please! For the love of God, please! Don't!"
"There are predators and there are prey," Gilligan rasped. "Good and evil don't come into it. And I'm what you made me be."
He fired.
OoOoOoO
Slowly, painfully, he trudged back into camp. Ramoo started to his feet, but Gilligan had the rifle trained on him before he could do anything more threatening. "Drop the spear," he barked.
Ramoo did.
"Let my friends out of the cave. Unlock the cage door, and don't try anything stupid."
Carefully, deliberately, Ramoo reached into a pocket, extracted the keys, and unfastened the chain holding the door shut. The other castaways swarmed out and away from him; the Skipper pausing only long enough to snatch up the spear and point it at Ramoo's gut.
Gilligan looked at them, apparently counting heads again, and sighed slightly, relieved. "Ramoo. How many people can fit in that helicopter at a time?
"Helicopter hold two. Only two."
He nodded, unsurprised. "Skipper, Professor, anyone, can any of you fly a helicopter? I can't. Wrongway was showing me how to fly his plane, but I think that's different. And I wasn't too good with the plane, anyhow."
Silence. None of them, it seemed, felt capable of piloting a helicopter.
"The radio tubes got smashed. We can't call anyone. So we'll have to fly back. Once the first of us gets back to civilization, we can send a boat or something back for the rest, but I don't trust his driving."
"Nor would I," the Professor agreed weakly. "Er… Gilligan… is Kinkaid…?"
"Dead," he said briefly. "Are any of you hurt?"
The Skipper felt a hysterical laugh bubbling up, and suppressing it was no picnic. Hunted like an animal for twenty-three and a half hours straight, and his only concern was that one of them might be hurt. If that wasn't Gilligan all over. "We're fine," he said. "We're all just fine. Are you all right, little buddy?"
"Sure," he said, not taking his eyes off Ramoo or his finger off the trigger. "Professor, if we can't fly it, do you think you could use the helicopter parts to make a boat or something? I really don't trust his driving, but I don't think I trust mine, either."
"You kill Boss," Ramoo said. "You kill Ramoo, too?"
"Probably," Gilligan agreed. "Unless anyone has any better ideas?"
It was Mary Ann, of all people, who stepped forward and put her hand on his unwounded arm. "Yes," she said. "Let him go. We let you go, Ramoo, and you fly back home, and tell people where to find us. In exchange, we won't tell anyone what you and Kinkaid tried to do here. Isn't that fair?"
Gilligan frowned. "I don't know about that, Mary Ann. I think it'd be safer to kill him and take our chances. Skipper?"
The Skipper took a deep, feral breath. "I say we kill him, too."
"We're not like that," Mary Ann insisted. "Gilligan! You're not like this. We have to let him go."
His glance flicked back to the Skipper.
"Mary Ann's right. Not in cold blood," the Professor said.
His gaze locked with the Professor's for a moment, then swung back to the Skipper. The dead-eyed calm remained frozen over his face, and the Professor fell silent. He could reason, Mary Ann could implore, anyone could say anything they liked, but there was only one opinion that mattered to him, and they all knew whose that was.
And the Skipper knew it too. He fought back the kill-or-die mindset that had gotten him through two wars, and he nodded grudging assent. "They're right, little buddy," he said. "We're not like them. Let's get this scum out of here."
"Yes, sir," Gilligan said, and gestured to Ramoo with the rifle. "Come on. Back to the lagoon. You're just lucky my friends are nicer than I am. Move!"
They marched him back to the helicopter, and the seven of them watched silently as he took off. It wasn't until the helicopter had vanished into the distance that Gilligan's calm shattered; he began to shake, and the rifle dropped from his suddenly nerveless fingers. He gave them one last desperate, imploring glance, turned, and ran.
Even half-dead with stress and exhaustion, he beat them back to camp, and they found him curled into a fetal position in the far corner of his hut, so deeply asleep that he didn't even stir as the Skipper picked him up and laid him gently in his hammock. Nobody saw as he removed Gilligan's cap and tenderly smoothed the sweat-soaked hair out of his eyes, and he wouldn't have much cared if they had, but he was grateful for the silence and the solitude while he regained his control.
Exiting the hut, he was every inch the confident Skipper he knew they all needed him to be. "It's all right," he said quietly to the others, sitting at their communal table. "He's asleep. That's what he needs most right now, I'd say."
"Right now, I'd say you're correct," the Professor said. "As for tomorrow, I suppose we'll have to wait and see."
OoOoOoO
That night, in their hut, Mr. Howell didn't seem able to settle down. His own words were ringing in his ears, and while that was usually an enjoyable phenomenon, this was not. Mrs. Howell waited it out, sitting at her dressing table and fussing with nothing in particular. She knew her husband. He could not be forced.
Eventually, he cleared his throat and said, too casually, "Lovey, darling, I rather think that I'm going to call off the Howell Annual Fox Hunt. Remember, I was hashing out the details some weeks back? On further reflection, I just don't think it's going to work out."
She frowned, thinking hard for a moment, then remembered. It was during the planning stages of her ill-fated Cotillion; he had suggested following it up with a fox hunt. She had objected; But Thurston, darling, there isn't a single fox on the island! And he had said, with a mischievous grin; We'll have to improvise. Just put one of your mink coats on Gilligan, and Tally-Ho! A joke. Only a joke… albeit one that was no longer amusing in the least. "I think that's probably for the best, Thurston, dear. This weather is far too humid for any such activities, anyhow. It would make us all perspire dreadfully."
"In fact," he went on, as if she hadn't spoken, "In fact, as soon as we get home, I think I'll be withdrawing my membership in the Hunt Club entirely. Utter rubbish, the whole thing. Can't imagine why I ever wasted my time on it."
"Perhaps you should, dear. It will leave you more free time to practice your polo, if nothing else," Mrs. Howell said.
"I should have given it up years ago," he said. "A Howell shouldn't be chasing around a helpless little creature… just standing by, watching while a pack of vicious dogs just tear the poor thing to bits. And for what? What did I ever see in the whole ghastly thing?"
"There, there, Thurston," she said, gently taking his arm and patting it reassuringly. "It's all right, darling. We never so much as set a date for the event; it was all just idle conversation. Nothing to worry about."
"Oh, Lovey," he said, and he pulled her close, put his head on her shoulder. She held him, gently stroking his back, and they stayed like that for some time.