Lost: The Novels Read online

  Hello, little friend, she thought, echoing the words Gayle had always used when a spider got in the house. Faith couldn’t begin to estimate the number of spiders the two of them had escorted outside over the years.

  “Huh?” George glanced around and spotted the spider as well. He scowled. “Move aside, sweetheart,” he told Faith. “I’ll take care of this…”

  He lifted one boot. With a gasp, Faith grabbed his arm and pulled him off-balance, forcing him to take a step back from the rock. “No!” she said. “Don’t kill it. It’s just minding its own business. It’s not hurting us.”

  “Not yet, maybe.” George chuckled slightly and shook his head. “If there’s one thing I learned on my trip to Australia, sweetheart, it’s that just about everything in this part of the world is poisonous. Better to take care of it before it takes care of you.”

  Before Faith could stop him, he lifted his foot again and stomped on the spider, squishing it flat against the rock. When he pulled back his foot, all that was left was a dark smear against the surface.

  Faith stared, horrified and speechless, at what was left of the spider. The small smudge left by its guts seemed to blur and shift before her eyes, suddenly looking far too much like a puddle of blood seeping into pale carpeting…

  She blinked the image away fiercely, but she couldn’t push away the feelings of anger, loathing, grief, helplessness, and guilt swelling inside of her. If only she hadn’t said anything about the little creature, George probably wouldn’t have noticed it. It would still be alive, not dead because of her. If only it were ever possible to go back and change things, fix what was about to go wrong. But it wasn’t. She knew that all too well, and the knowledge suddenly filled her like lead in her veins, dragging her down.

  “Okay, back to work.” Brushing off his hands, George grasped the suitcase again. “Ready to pull again, sweetheart?”

  Overwhelmed with emotion, Faith spun on her heel and raced away down the beach. Blinded with tears, she could hardly see where she was going. She knew she was being stupid, risking puncturing her bare feet on some bit of metal or tripping over a smoking hunk of wreckage. But she had to get away before she broke down completely.

  “Hey!” George’s voice behind her sounded surprised. “Where are you going?”

  She didn’t answer or slow down. Instead she kept running until she’d put several large chunks of the fuselage and at least a dozen people between her and George. Then she glanced over her shoulder, fearing that he might try to follow her. It was only after several minutes had passed with no sign of him that she began to relax.

  Now that the moment had passed, she started to feel slightly foolish. Why had she overreacted like that? True, George’s act had been thoughtless and violent and completely unnecessary, and that sort of thing always bothered her. It was natural that seeing him kill that spider would upset her or make her angry—but not that it should make her completely lose it.

  “Yo.” A familiar voice broke into her thoughts. “It’s Faith, right? Hey, you okay? You look kind of, you know, bright red.”

  Turning, she saw Hurley standing there staring at her. “S-sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand in what was probably a vain attempt to hide the fact that she’d been crying. “I’m all right. It’s just…”

  She trailed off helplessly, not sure how to explain herself. But Hurley gave a sympathetic half smile.

  “You don’t have to tell me, dude,” he said. “We’re all a little freaked right now, you know? But here—you better drink some water before you faint or something.” He held out a clear plastic bottle.

  For the first time she noticed that his pudgy arms were full of bottles and cans. She just stared at the one he was holding out for a moment, her brain seeming to chug along in slow motion.

  He waggled the bottle at her. “It’s okay,” he said. “I found it—you know. In there.” He jerked his head toward the largest remaining section of the body of the plane, making his curly hair bounce.

  “Thanks.” Accepting the bottle, Faith unscrewed the cap with trembling fingers and took a long drink from it. As soon as the water hit her throat, she realized how dehydrated she was. The water helped clear her head almost immediately, and she felt a tiny bit better. “I needed that,” she told Hurley gratefully as she tried to hand back the half-drained bottle.

  “Keep it,” he said, waving it away.

  “Thanks.” Now that her brain was working again, she decided it was time to try to make herself useful—for real this time. Most of the screaming and frantic urgency of the immediate aftermath of the crash seemed to have died down, but she was sure there were still plenty of people who needed help. “Um, do you know where the doctor is?” she asked.

  “You mean that dude Jack?” Hurley shrugged. “Nuh-uh. Haven’t seen him for a while. Why, you feeling sick or something?”

  “No, nothing like that. I was just going to see if he needed any help.” Faith was no medical professional, but as a scientist she figured maybe she could be of some use.

  “Oh, okay. Good luck finding him. Let me know if you need any more water, okay?” Hurley wandered off, still juggling his load of bottles and cans.

  Faith moved on as well, circling the larger pieces of wreckage as she looked for the doctor. He was nowhere in sight, though she got a closer look at some of her other fellow survivors. There was a man lying under the shade of some wreckage with half of one leg ripped to bloody shreds. Someone had rigged up a tourniquet with a necktie, and a young woman was offering him a sip of water from a bottle like the ones Hurley was carrying around. Nearby a middle-aged woman sat on the sand clutching a necklace and staring out to sea, rocking slightly and humming to herself. Faith recognized her as the woman she’d seen Jack trying to revive right after the crash. When Faith smiled tentatively at her, pleased to see that Jack had been successful, the woman seemed not to notice. Faith moved on, taking in the sights of injured people, people digging frantically through the still-smoking wreckage, people just wandering around in a daze…

  Faith felt increasingly helpless as she wondered what she could possibly do to help. She was staring at a young boy holding what appeared to be a dog’s leash when a dark-skinned Middle Eastern man approached her.

  “Pardon, miss,” he said, his voice polite yet commanding.

  She stared uncertainly at him, trying to place his accent. “Yes?”

  “I’m trying to organize a few people to help build some signal fires here on the beach,” the man told her. “To help the rescue party spot us. They’ll need to be big, so we need wood—lots of it. And anything else that will burn—leaves, twigs, dried seaweed…”

  “Oh—okay.” Faith gave him a shaky smile. “I can do that.”

  “Excellent.” The man nodded briskly. “Bring whatever you find over there.” He pointed out a spot nearby, then turned away. Almost as an afterthought, he glanced over his shoulder and added, “My name is Sayid.”

  “I’m Faith. Nice to meet you,” Faith said, feeling silly as she realized Sayid was already striding away out of earshot. With a shrug, she glanced around. There didn’t seem to be any decent fire-building material nearby, so she headed for the tree line, relieved to have something useful to do to take her mind off everything else.

  By the time the sun dipped down to meet the horizon, the burning wreckage had given way to several campfires built from the fallen branches, driftwood, and dried palm leaves gathered by Faith, Sayid, and the other castaways he’d enlisted. Watching the flames shoot up from the teepee-shaped piles of wood, Faith stretched her arms and shoulders, which were sore from the afternoon’s physical labor. It felt good to stand there and rest, enjoying the warmth of the fire. The air had chilled as the sun set, and a cool sea breeze tickled her sunburned face and lifted the thin hairs at her temples.

  Suddenly becoming aware of a painful throbbing in her leg, she glanced down. She’d been so busy since arriving at the beach that she’d almost forgotten about the
gash on her shin. But now it was making itself known, shooting fiery fingers of pain up and down her calf.

  She sat down on the sand, stretching out the leg in front of her. The last scraps of her pantyhose had long since ripped away, leaving her skin exposed. Leaning forward, she squinted in the rapidly fading light to examine the wound. It had stopped bleeding quite a while ago, and for a second she thought a scab was already forming. Then she realized she was looking at a coating of dirt and sand. She poked tentatively at the gash with her fingers before realizing that probably wasn’t doing her much good—her hands were filthy.

  Pushing herself to her feet, she walked down to the edge of the sea. The salt water stung every cut and scrape on her legs as she waded into the surf, and she gritted her teeth against the additional pain. She bent down to rinse her hands as best she could, then used a relatively clean corner of her shirt to scrub away the grime from the main gash. That made it bleed a little more, but it already felt much better as she splashed her way back toward the dry sand.

  As she left the water, she spotted Jack a little farther up the beach. She hesitated, not sure whether she should bother him with her minor wound when he had so many more seriously injured people to worry about. Stick up for yourself, sweetie, her sister’s voice chided in her head. You’re just as important as anyone else. Taking a deep breath, Faith nodded to herself and headed toward the doctor.

  When she reached him, Jack was bending over a man lying motionless on the sand with a large piece of shrapnel sticking out of his abdomen. The tall, high-cheekboned woman Faith had seen in the jungle just after the crash was there, too. Her wavy hair was now pulled back in a thick braid, and she was watching what Jack was doing with an intent expression. Remembering the woman’s odd behavior and sudden disappearance earlier almost made Faith rethink her approach. But just then Jack glanced up and spotted her.

  “Hi there,” he called out. “You okay? Did you need something?”

  “It’s probably no big deal,” Faith said. “Just my leg…”

  Jack stepped toward her, kneeling down to examine her wound. “You got yourself a pretty good laceration here. Looks pretty clean, though—did you wash it out?”

  Faith nodded. “Just now. In the ocean.”

  “Okay. If you can get your hands on some fresh water, you might want to rinse it off with that, too. That big guy—what’s his name, Hurley?—was collecting water, I think. Fortunately I don’t think you’ll need stitches.”

  Faith noticed that he glanced back at the other woman as he said the last part, a shadow of a smile flashing across his face. The woman smiled back, making Faith feel uncomfortably out of the loop. Were they making fun of her?

  “Okay,” she said uncertainly. “I just wanted to check with you about it. You know—since I heard you’re a doctor and all.”

  She felt kind of foolish even as she said it, especially when she looked at the unconscious man still lying nearby. There was blood oozing out of his ugly wound on all sides, making the flesh around the chunk of shrapnel look blackened and crusty. His breathing sounded shallow and ragged, and his face was very pale. She turned away with a shudder.

  “Sorry to bother you,” she added to Jack, already backing away.

  “No bother.” Jack’s smile looked tired but genuine. “And hey, if you can find some alcohol, it wouldn’t hurt to splash some of that on the wound, too. Then just keep it as clean as you can and let me know if you think it may be getting infected, okay?”

  “Okay. Thanks.” Faith was far too tired to think about searching the wreckage for alcohol at the moment. Besides, the pain had subsided a lot since she’d cleaned out the wound. Still, she figured the least she could do was find Hurley and ask for more water.

  It didn’t take long to find him. He was making his way across an open section of beach, balancing a tray of foil-wrapped packages. When he heard her request, he nodded toward a spot near the main chunk of fuselage. “Water’s over there,” he said. “I’m passing out food right now. Want one?”

  He held out one of the packages. Faith accepted it, realizing her stomach was growling hungrily. “Thanks.”

  The airplane food was cold and greasy, but Faith wolfed it down as if it were a gourmet feast. When she had finished, she went in search of the water. Taking one bottle, she carefully splashed a little on her leg, then drank the rest.

  After that she just sat by one of the fires, tired and not thinking much, as full darkness fell. Other survivors drifted in and out of the glowing orange circles around the fires. One of them, a tall, lean, handsome man with the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow covering his angular jaw, wandered up to Faith’s fire and leaned down to light a cigarette. Then he stood there, smoking and staring fixedly into the flames.

  “Hi,” Faith said, summoning up the courage to make the first overture of friendship. There was no sign of rescuers yet, which meant they were probably stuck here on this beach until morning. It didn’t seem like the time to let her shyness get in the way of connecting with people. “Um, my name’s Faith.”

  “Is that right?” The man turned and stared down at her with indolent curiosity. His lips stretched slightly into a smile that looked more like a smirk. “With a name like that, your folks must have been optimists.”

  Faith blushed, immediately feeling like a nerdy kid who’d just sat down at the wrong lunch table. The man took the cigarette in one hand and sent a puff of smoke spiraling into the air as he studied her face. Then he turned away and resumed staring into the fire.

  “Guess we’re both among the lucky ones today, Faith,” he said after a moment of silence.

  Faith smiled uncertainly. “Yeah, I guess so,” she said. “Although it was sort of unlucky for me in a way, too—I wasn’t even supposed to be on this flight. I switched onto it at the last minute when the conference I was at…um, went bad.”

  Why in the world had she said that? She instantly regretted sharing so much. The man turned and gazed at her with mild interest, his eyes gleaming darkly in the flickering firelight.

  “That so?” he drawled. “So what happened?”

  Before Faith could decide how to answer, her thoughts were drowned out by a deafening, roaring, crunching noise from the direction of the jungle. It sounded a little like rolling thunder, but the night sky was clear overhead—and besides, what kind of thunder started from the ground? As the sound faded, faint echoes bouncing off the tree-clad hills, there was a flurry of squawking and flapping as birds and other creatures fled before the sound—or whatever had created it. A second later there was a loud crash, followed by an echoing tonal reverberation, almost as if the mountains were moaning.

  “What the hell was that?” the smoking man said, turning away from Faith to stare in the direction of the noise.

  Faith couldn’t answer. She’d never heard anything like the sound before in her life. The oddly metallic undertone of it chilled her, sounding very out of place in this overwhelmingly green, natural spot.

  The thunder-crunch sound came again, slightly fainter this time. By now almost everyone on the beach was staring into the jungle. Muttering a curse under his breath, Faith’s companion loped off toward the edge of the beach, where several of the castaways were starting to gather.

  Faith stood and followed more slowly, not at all certain she wanted to move any closer to the mysterious clamor. It was tempting to duck into one of the larger pieces of wreckage to hide from view, just in case. Instead she merely stopped well short of the main group, peering between people toward the jungle. The treetops shook as there was another loud crash and roll, and a tall palm that had been silhouetted against the moonlit sky in the cleft between two hills suddenly shivered and collapsed, disappearing as if yanked down from below.

  Wrapping her arms around herself, Faith forced herself to breathe. In, out. In, out.

  The shocked murmur of voices on the beach was overwhelmed by another thunderous crunching sound. This time the echo rang out longer than ever, with an aft
ershock of metallic timbre followed by a series of crashes. Faith’s eyes widened as she glanced to the left and saw more trees going down, one after another, most of them just a few layers of jungle from the edge of the beach…

  Wooooooo. The weird echo was back, though quieter now. There was a final, somewhat subdued thump. And then all was still.

  “Terrific,” someone muttered from somewhere in the main group. Nobody else spoke for a long moment, and Faith had the feeling she wasn’t the only one having trouble remembering to breathe.

  After a couple of minutes it seemed clear that whatever they’d heard out there wasn’t coming back—for the moment, at least. Trying to convince herself that there had to be a perfectly natural and normal explanation for what she’d just seen and heard, Faith wandered back toward the closest fire. Halfway there, she heard someone calling her name.

  She turned to see George hurrying toward her. She hadn’t encountered him since the spider incident earlier, and she wondered if he was still annoyed that she’d abandoned their little luggage-gathering project so abruptly. But he didn’t seem to be thinking about that.

  “Didja see that?” he demanded, glancing over his shoulder in the direction of the jungle. “What was that sound out there?”

  An attractive young blond woman wearing a white miniskirt was standing nearby with her arms wrapped around herself. “I don’t know,” she answered George’s question, wrinkling her nose with distaste. “And I don’t care. I just wish the rescue boats would get here already.”

  “No kidding, Shannon,” someone else said, sounding nervous and cranky at the same time. “Why don’t you try a new tune? That one’s getting old already.”

  Faith glanced over and saw that the speaker was the good-looking young guy who’d been running around the beach just after the crash collecting pens, of all things. He was frowning at the pretty blond.