My heart pounds in my chest, and I wish I could warn him.
“Cy!” I scream, tugging his hand. He finally turns back to me, lifts me up in his arms and bends his face down to me.
“I saw someone!” I scream, my voice drowned out quickly with the gust of wind.
“What?”
“A person!” I shriek. “There was a person!”
“Where?” he screams back, and I point vaguely ahead. He nods, places me back on the ground, lifts a huge stick off the ground and hands it to me, then wrenches a branch as big as a small tree trunk from the earth. We walk hand in hand, slower now, but prepared to defend ourselves.
We fight the wind and rain as we go the few paces toward the shelter, and he opens the door ahead of me. He’s got his stick in his hand, and he’s posed like a baseball player up to bat. Ready to strike. He’s prepared to attack if he has to, fight anyone who might’ve gone in before us, but there’s no one there.
“Come out if you’re hiding!” he screams, his voice sounding so much louder now that we’re out of the storm and in the shelter. But no one responds, neither inside nor out. He looks to me and holds the stick—I guess it could be called a club, it’s so big—in his hands like a baseball bat. I wouldn’t want to cross him now. Seriously, anyone who did would have cast iron balls.
Or… be reduced to savage instincts.
Not merely a man anymore.
He’s told me that’s what happened to some of the others, how some of them became savage, like animals, not like him but beyond human comprehension or reason.
“What did you see?”
“Just a blur, but it was definitely a human,” I tell him. “But I couldn’t see in the rain. He was a man for sure.”
He curses under his breath and paces the room.
“Must’ve been Will,” he says. But when he describes him, it doesn’t meet the description at all.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I didn’t get a good view at all, but that’s nothing like what I saw. This man was smaller than you, but he had dark blond hair. He wasn’t little. He was big, but not as big as you, and I couldn’t see much else.”
He frowns. “That’s not possible.”
What?
“I know what I saw.”
“Maybe you’re hallucinating,” he says. “You’re positive it was a human?”
His denial of what I’m telling him makes me angry. I take a step toward him.
I saw the savage look in the man’s eyes. I glare at Cy.
“No less than the man who tried to rape me.”
His eyes darken and his jaw clenches at the reminder of my assault.
“So someone’s here, then,” he says. “But it can’t be…”
His voice trails off.
“What? What are you talking about?”
He shakes his head. “Harper, the blond guy... the only other blond guy on this island… he’s dead.”
The wind has begun to die down, the rain slowing as well, but I shiver as if a gust of wind just ripped through the shelter.
“How is that possible?” I whisper.
He shakes his head and changes the subject. “No fucking idea. But if what you’re telling me is true…” his voice trails off, and his gaze comes back to me. “We’re not alone.”
I swallow hard.
“But we’re together.”
He drags me to his chest and holds me, then kisses the top of my head so fiercely it hurts. I close my eyes. Something tells me this is going to get harder before it gets easier. I swallow but don’t speak. His next sentence takes me off guard.
“Once the storm is totally clear, I’m going hunting.”
“Let me go with you,” I say, more of a statement than a plea.
This time, he doesn’t even disagree with me.
“There’s no point in trying to keep you safe by keeping you away,” he says. “So yeah, babe. You can come hunting. For now, let’s get some sleep. We got hardly any last night.” His eyes look heavy, and there’s a weariness about him I didn’t notice before.
But he doesn’t sleep. He takes his club and barricades the door, leads me to the bed in the dark, and lays me down. I lay on his chest for long minutes. He’s still rigid. Awake. Watchful. Listening.
Finally, I fall into a deep and dreamless sleep.FifteenCyIt makes no sense.
No sense.
How can someone else be alive? It has to be Derek. He was the only one who fits the description she gave.
But it can’t be. How could it be?
Attacked by insects only six days into our landing here, he died. I saw his blank, lifeless eyes myself.
Is she going mad?
She got angry when I suggested she was mistaken, but I’m completely bewildered.
When Harper finally falls asleep, I get up, carefully, so I don’t wake her, and pace in the darkness around our shelter. I listen for any sounds at all of someone approaching. If it is Derek… and somehow, he… fuck, I don’t know, came back to life? No, what the hell am I saying? I’m a reasonable, rational human being.