Lost: The Novels Page 3

  He probably isn’t thinking straight right now, Faith realized. And no wonder, after what just happened to all of us. Despite his show of bravado, George had to be feeling just as anxious and frightened as any of the sobbing or screaming people wandering around the beach. The only difference was, he chose to cover it up with action. Faith’s older sister had been that type of person, too—whenever she was expecting news from her doctors, Gayle had always bustled around cleaning the house from top to bottom and creating time-consuming little odd jobs for herself like organizing the attic or alphabetizing the National Geographic magazines in the den.

  “You’re right,” Faith said. “Gathering up the luggage is probably a good idea. Plus we can keep an eye out for anyone who needs our help while we’re working, right?”

  George seemed satisfied with the compromise. “Sure, of course. Now let’s go. I saw some stuff over there…”

  Faith scurried across the hot sand in the direction he indicated, grabbing a leather briefcase half-buried in the sand a few feet away. As she dropped it by the tree, she spotted a tiny green lizard scampering across the sand. She smiled at it, thinking how much it looked like the tiny, bejeweled lizard pin Gayle had worn on her winter coat…

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the shrill screech of metal against metal. She turned to face the beach just in time to see the huge chunk of protruding wing she’d noticed earlier sway and then collapse heavily to the ground. It landed with a crunch and a shower of sparks, and the resulting explosion caused a chain reaction of blasts and shooting flames that rocked the entire beach, sending huge pieces of wreckage flying into the air and waves of fire and heat rolling in all directions.

  Even as it was happening George leaped toward Faith, pushing her behind him. The tail end of one wave of heat blew past and warmed their faces, making Faith squint.

  “Thanks,” she said shyly, realizing that George was shielding her with his own body. She couldn’t help being touched by his selfless, paternal act. Here she was, thousands of miles from home and all alone, and a perfect stranger was trying to protect her.…It was a strange feeling. But nice.

  George glanced at her briefly and shrugged, his gaze almost immediately wandering back out to the beach. “This whole situation is crazy. Be right back…” He hurried off down the beach.

  Looking back at the blazing remains of the wing, Faith saw three people lying on the sand nearby where the explosion had flung them. Fortunately all three seemed to be all right. When they sat up, Faith saw that among them was the man George had pointed out a moment ago—the doctor. With him were a heavyset young man with a headful of frizzy brown curls and a pretty blond pregnant woman in a filthy tank top. All three looked dazed by their close call—Faith guessed that the wing must have come close to landing on them.

  The doctor climbed to his feet almost immediately and hurried off, leaving the other two sitting on the sand looking dazed. Faith walked toward them, wanting to make sure they were all right.

  “Dude,” the heavy guy said before she could speak, breathing hard and staring at her with wide eyes. “Did you see that? Talk about a close one.”

  “Yeah, way too close,” his companion added shakily, her soft voice laced with an Australian accent.

  “Are you guys okay?” Faith asked, crouching beside them.

  The blond woman put a hand on her protruding belly. “I’m not sure. I guess so,” she said.

  Faith glanced in the direction the other man had gone. “Good thing that guy warned you when he did,” she said. “I heard he’s a doctor. Is that right?”

  The young man nodded. “Yeah, I guess so. His name’s Jack.” He shrugged. “They call me Hurley, by the way.”

  “And I’m Claire,” the pregnant woman offered, one hand still resting lightly on her stomach.

  “My name’s Faith. It’s nice to meet you.”

  The words sounded weirdly formal under the circumstances, even to herself, and she giggled slightly. She immediately felt terrible for laughing at such a serious time, but Hurley and Claire smiled back at her.

  “This is pretty crazy, isn’t it?” Claire commented, waving one slim hand to encompass everything going on around them.

  Faith nodded. She was trying to think of something else to say when she heard George calling her name. Turning, she saw him hurrying toward her.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded, skidding to a stop in front of her. “I thought you were helping me gather luggage.”

  “I was just making sure these guys are okay,” Faith said. “Claire here is pregnant…maybe I should stay here and help her.”

  George took in Claire’s bulging belly. “You having any problems, young lady?” he asked her with concern. “With the baby? Contractions or whatever?”

  “I was.” Claire glanced over at Hurley. “But I think I’m okay now.” She started to climb to her feet, wobbling a little. Hurley quickly pushed himself upright, taking her arm to steady her. “Thanks,” she told him gratefully, rubbing her stomach as she straightened up.

  “All right, then. This young fellow looks like he’s got the situation under control.” George nodded toward Hurley. “Ain’t that right, sport?”

  “Sure, dude.” Hurley was still panting a little from exertion. “Whatever you say.”

  “Good.” George glanced at Faith. “We’d better get back to work, then.”

  Faith wasn’t sure how to respond. What George had just said was innocuous enough on the surface. Still, something about the way he’d said it rubbed her the wrong way—as if he couldn’t even conceive of the possibility that she might have a different opinion on how to proceed. Maybe she was being overly sensitive, but it set off alarms inside her head. Why was this guy she just met already acting as if he owned her?

  4

  “HERE, HOLD THIS FOR a second.” Without waiting for a response, Oscar shoved his sign into Faith’s hand and took off. Within seconds he disappeared into the sea of noisy protesters that stretched for several blocks along the city street.

  A nervous shiver passed through Faith’s body. She glanced around at the strangers’ faces surrounding her. It had been nearly a month since she and Oscar had met outside Arreglo’s office, though it sometimes seemed like only a few minutes and at other times like a couple of years. That was thanks to Oscar. He was like a force of nature, overwhelming Faith’s shyness and uncertainty with the raw strength of his personality, entwining himself around her life like a constrictor around its prey, easily swallowing her lonely existence into the warm center of his active life. After one date—a trip to the reptile house at the zoo—Oscar had told her she was the most beautiful and intriguing woman he’d ever known. After the second date, he’d suggested moving in together. While Faith was a little too cautious to go for that so soon, she had soon found herself spending far more time at his cramped, messy apartment than she did in her own sterile dorm room in Grad Hall C.

  She was getting so used to spending time with him that it had started to feel strange when they weren’t together—a brand-new feeling for someone who over the past few years had grown accustomed to spending most of her time alone.

  So where did he rush off to in such a hurry? she wondered, craning her neck to try to see where he’d gone.

  The sea of faces shifted and flowed around her, making her a bit dizzy. For a moment she thought she’d spotted Oscar’s distinctive head of wild dark hair a few yards away, but then the figure turned and she saw that the hair belonged to a hugely obese, smiling woman dressed in a batik housecoat.

  Faith shrugged off a flash of panic and told herself to chill out. Ever since childhood, she’d had an irrational fear of abandonment. Oscar had probably spotted a reporter and rushed off to try to get on TV, as usual. No big deal. He might be distractible, but he wasn’t completely thoughtless. He would be back.

  Lifting Oscar’s sign in one hand and her own in the other, Faith resumed chanting along with the people around her—“Q Corp, stay home! Leave the rain fo
rest alone! Q Corp, stay home! Leave the rain forest alone…”

  This protest, the fifth or sixth one she’d attended with Oscar so far, was taking place outside Q Corp’s Chicago headquarters. She and Oscar had ridden up to the city on a charter bus along with several dozen others from the university. It was the first time Faith had left the campus area to protest, and this was by far the largest and rowdiest crowd she’d experienced so far. Along with the usual gang of college students and activists, Faith could see a variety of other people out there chanting and singing, from young children to high school kids to middle-aged housewife types to senior citizens with walkers or canes. The news of Q Corp’s proposed new plant site had hit the news hard over the past couple of weeks, stirring up controversy everywhere.

  Good, Faith thought, pausing in her chanting to catch her breath. Maybe they would actually get Q Corp’s attention with this one.

  “Animals are people, too—save them from the evil Q!”

  She was still a little surprised by how quickly she had taken to protesting. All her life she’d been the quiet one, the girl who never spoke out or caused any trouble. When teams were picked back in grade school, Faith was the one who’d hung back behind the others and stared at the floor until her name was called. In high school, she’d quit the school newspaper when they wanted her to be a section editor and help run the story meetings. And that time her sister had dramatically confronted a neighbor about his skinny, neglected dog, ending up with her picture in the paper and a commendation from the local animal shelter, Faith was the one who’d quietly gone about nursing the poor mutt back to health and finding him a new home.

  She had never minded staying behind the scenes—she preferred it that way. But this sort of thing was different. In a huge, noisy crowd, she finally felt as if she had permission to let herself go; she could jump up and down and shout out whatever was on her mind without feeling foolish or shy. When she was part of a protest, she felt accepted in a way she never had before.

  Oscar always looked at her funny when she tried to explain that to him. Whether he understood or not, though, she was grateful to him for introducing her to his world—which was also her world now, or at least it was beginning to feel that way. It was incredible to be able to look around and know that she was a part of a group of people who cared about the same things she cared about so deeply. Just knowing that made her feel almost as safe as she barely remembered feeling as a small child before her parents died. She loved that feeling; so warm, so comfortable, so inclusive…

  “Kill the capitalist pigs!” a voice shrieked piercingly nearby, shocking Faith out of her thoughts.

  She winced as she glanced that way and spotted a crazy-eyed woman waving a particularly rude sign. Faith wasn’t crazy about the way protesting forced her to rub elbows with the fringier zealots and radicals in the environmental movement. While she admired their passion and dedication, their extreme positions often made her uncomfortable—especially when the media acted as if all green-minded people were like that. Still, it seemed a small price to pay for getting their message across.

  She stayed where she was for a while, waving both signs. When her arms began to ache from holding them up, she realized that Oscar had been gone a long time. Abandoning the signs against a nearby lamppost, she pushed her way through the crowd looking for him. The last thing she wanted was to get permanently separated from him in this crowd, which was growing as the day went on. She wasn’t even sure where they were supposed to meet the charter bus later…

  Just as she was starting to feel a few twinges of real panic, she finally spotted Oscar’s familiar angular shoulders and untamed dark hair. He was standing on the curb near the corner at one end of the protest area. The crowd was thinner there, so Faith could see that he was talking to a rather seedy-looking young man with a scraggly goatee. Dodging past a handful of teenage girls doing some kind of interpretive dance and a sixtyish guy playing the banjo, she moved closer. Just as she finally reached Oscar, the goatee guy loped away and disappeared into the crowd.

  “Oh, hey,” Oscar greeted her. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Who was that guy?”

  “Who?” Oscar glanced around. “Oh, you mean Z-Man? Nobody. I mean, he’s just a guy I met online. We wanted to meet up here and say hi.” He waved his hands in front of his face as if shooing away a bad smell, a gesture he employed whenever a subject ceased to interest him. “But listen, he just told me something interesting. You know your good buddy Arreglo?”

  Faith felt the muscles in her face tense. Even though her break with Dr. Arreglo was what had brought her and Oscar together, it remained a touchy subject between them. Oscar couldn’t seem to understand why Faith kept finding excuses not to join him at the daily protests in front of Arreglo’s office. Sometimes she wasn’t sure she understood it herself. She had done as promised and requested another adviser, but a small part of her heart couldn’t seem to accept the situation and move on.

  Maybe that was because she still wasn’t entirely sure she’d done the right thing. What if she’d stayed to listen to Dr. Arreglo a little longer? Oscar said there was no excuse for what he’d done, but was that true?

  She tried not to worry over such questions too much; for one thing, she knew that if she went back to Arreglo, Oscar would probably dump her—he’d all but threatened to do so, more than once. She assumed he was just being dramatic, but even so she definitely didn’t want to risk it. Especially not now when her world seemed to be opening up for the first time in years.

  Besides, she doubted the outcome would be any different even if she did try to talk things out with Arreglo again. She was no debater, especially when dealing with a subject so near to her heart. She could never seem to stop feeling long enough to listen and think and respond.

  Regardless, she couldn’t quite stop the nagging feeling that Dr. Arreglo might be disappointed in her for what had happened between them that day in his office. After a lifetime spent admiring the man, that idea was hard to take. But what choice did she have?

  Oscar didn’t seem to notice her consternation. “Z-Man heard that Arreglo got hired to speak at this huge, big-deal enviro conference coming up next month in Australia.”

  Faith already knew about the conference—the Worldwide Ecology Conference had been on Arreglo’s schedule for months. But she didn’t bother to tell Oscar that. She already knew him well enough to know that he tended to get irritated when interrupted.

  “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could go?” Oscar’s eyes were bright and eager. “We could protest his talk, let that bastard Arreglo and the rest of the world know with no question that he’s now environmental enemy number one.…Talk about a kick!”

  Faith smiled weakly. “I’ve always wanted to visit Australia,” she said, carefully sidestepping the Arreglo issue. “Conference or no conference.”

  He shot her a glance. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “The snakes, right?”

  “You know me so well,” Faith said lightly. “I mean, all those venomous species—taipans, Death Adders, copperheads, Mulgas—that whole continent is like the Holy Grail to my herpetologist heart, you know?”

  Even before Faith had settled on a career in herpetology, she and Gayle had always talked about saving their pennies and making the trip Down Under someday. Gayle had always wanted to get a close-up look at the exotic birds and cuddly koalas, not to mention the rugged men with their cute accents. Faith wanted to see all the unusual flora and fauna of the faraway continent—but most of all, of course, the snakes.

  “So you’ll go with me?” Oscar demanded, taking a step forward and grabbing her hands.

  Faith shrugged. “I’d love to,” she said. “But there’s not a chance. We’re both broke students, remember?”

  He grinned at her, squeezing her hands so tight it almost hurt. “Where there’s a will there’s a way, baby. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

  5

  “COME ON, DAMMIT, PULL harder!” George
was red-faced and sweating as he adjusted his grip on the strap of a large suitcase protruding out from beneath what appeared to be a large chunk of the plane’s engine.

  Faith sighed, wiping her palms on the front of her already grimy skirt. She was exhausted. Not to mention thirsty and hot. She could almost feel her fair skin sizzling and burning under the dazzling afternoon rays of the tropical sun. The fumes still pouring out of various parts of the charred plane were making her dizzy, and it didn’t help that nearly everywhere she looked she saw the burned and/or bleeding bodies of her fellow castaways. More than anything she wanted to wander back into the shade of the nearby bamboo grove and sit down for a while in hopes it would all just go away.

  “Maybe we should give up on this one,” she suggested as George gritted his teeth and gave another yank on the bag. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to budge it.”

  “Not with an attitude like that, we’re not,” he said with determination. “Now quit your bellyachin’ and help me pull!”

  Faith opened her mouth to argue some more, or at least protest the way he was ordering her around, but the languid tropical heat made it hard to think of what to say. Suddenly it seemed easier just to go along with him, at least for the moment. The decision made her feel like a wimp, but she compromised with herself by vowing that she would insist on taking a break after they got this bag out—they both needed a rest by now.

  George stepped back a few inches and braced one work boot against a large boulder embedded in the sand behind them. Tightening her grip on the suitcase’s other handle, Faith glanced down to brace her own bare foot and saw movement on the boulder’s rocky surface.

  “Careful!” she warned, dropping the strap and leaning closer. A small but chunky black spider with thick white markings was scuttling across the rock. She was no expert on the arachnids in this part of the world, but it looked to her like it was probably some member of the Salticidae family.