Following, Part Seven [Jack/Juliet] [R] [WIP]
Title: Following (Part Seven)
Characters: Juliet, Jack, Charlotte, Daniel, Hurley, Bernard & Rose (so far)
Pairing: Juliet/Jack, hints of Charlotte/Daniel
Rating: R (sex, language)
Spoilers: Season 4
A/N: Remember when I said I couldn’t write douche!Jack? It turns out that I was kind of just kidding about that. A slightly toned-down version of self-destructive Jack makes a brief appearance in this part (I just had to do it!), but don’t worry: he won’t stick around for long! Comments are ♥!
~~
When he opened his eyes again, he was not surprised to find himself in a familiar operating room, the ugly green flicker of the fluorescent lights above him already making him feel sick to his stomach. Juliet was standing above him, adjusting a clear drip that was feeding into his arm: she hadn’t yet noticed that he was awake.
He moved slightly and felt the stitches pulling, wiring tight inside him. The pain was intolerable; he felt like a corpse. Reluctantly, he forced himself to take a few breaths in and out, trying to make use of the oppressive grey air around them.
“Why didn’t you leave?” He croaked. His voice echoed strangely in the cavernous room.
She let go of the drip.
“Jack,” she turned to him, the blue in her eyes leaping out at him with relief. She stroked the side of his face, and despite his anger, despite everything that had happened, he couldn’t help closing his eyes when he felt the soft pressure of her gloved palm against his jaw.
“How are you feeling?” she asked. Two cool fingers were slipping down to find his pulse.
With some difficulty, he raised his hand to her forearm. He had meant to catch hold of it suddenly to get her attention, but he found his fingers loosening and sliding down her arm, following the delicate blue veins that ran from elbow to wrist. The question he’d wanted to scream dissolved into a whisper.
“Why didn’t you leave?”
“Hey,” she smiled at him, running a hand through his hair, “It’s ok. You’re still out of it from the drugs. Just relax for a minute and we can talk.”
“No-I’m not-I’m not out of it,” he shook his head, swallowing hard. “I gave you Shannon’s name. You had time: you could have made it. Why didn’t you go?”
Her finger slipped from his throat, his pulse forgotten.
“Jack,” she looked down at him, “You can’t be serious.”
He only looked back at her insistently.
“Your appendix was rupturing-did you think I was going to leave you here to die?
“I told-I asked you to.” He took a deep breath, “You should have.”
“What? That’s ridiculous.” He realized that she was pulling her arm from his, and reluctantly, he let go of her wrist. “We are not going to have this conversation right now: you’ve just come through surgery-you don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Your sister needed you-and you had a chance: Ben was gone; Locke was on the other side of the island. You had a f-You had a gun, Juliet. Nobody would’ve been able to stop you.” He could actually see the image of her clear path as if it were still before them.
“I-Jack, I couldn’t-”
“Don’t you get it, Juliet? This isn’t the real world: That is. Life on this island-my life-isn’t worth saving-especially when it means giving up on your-”
“Don’t, Jack-” She paused, shaking, “Don’t you dare tell me what’s real. I just-” Her voice caught on the word, struggled there for a long moment. “I just gave up my only chance of seeing my sister to save you.”
Her mouth hung open after she had finished speaking as though she’d only just understood what she had said. As she lowered her face under the light, he could suddenly see the redness of her eyes, the strain in her face, the way her gloved hands were trembling against the table. Finally, she closed her mouth, moving jerkily back to the saline to untangle the cord. She didn’t look at him as she finished, peeling off the gloves (a streak of his own blood on the back of one glistening, momentarily, over her knuckles) and dropping them into the bin at her feet.
“Juliet-” He whispered, feeling his anger recede like the tide, leaving him disoriented and miserable in its wake. The fantasy was still playing brokenly before him like the memory of something that had happened in another life: Juliet mounting the helicopter in the distance, flying away from this (three-year) nightmare, to her sister.
When he’d been lying in the grass on the playground, not knowing whether she’d gone, all he had been able to think was that it would have been worth it-all of his missteps and failures-to see that helicopter fading against the sky and to know that she was on it. He had wished for her escape almost harder than he had wished for his own.
Yet a moment ago, when Juliet had placed her warm hand against his face, the picture of that dream had faded, false and cold around him. Throbbing so close to him that it was more like a bodily pain than a feeling, a traitorous, irrepressible joy had sprung up inside him, refusing to remain buried: Relief.
That she had chosen to stay.
That she hadn’t left him.
Juliet didn’t respond to her name, moving around the table slowly, oblivious to his realization; when she spoke again, her voice was neutral, colorless, as her eyes followed the lines etched on the table.
“I gave you some oxycodone about half an hour ago: it should start to kick in soon. Charlotte and Daniel will be back in five minutes: tell them if you feel lightheaded or if the stitches start hurting more than they should. I’ll come back later, to change your bandages.” Her bare hand stretched out to touch him, hovering over his arm, but at the last minute, she pulled away. “I should-I have to go now-”
The medicine was already beginning to work: he could feel it in his veins flowing freely, smoothing the jagged lines in him, taking away all his anger, leaving only the regret.
“Juliet-” he slurred, unable to make it sound the way he wanted. Sorry.
“We’ll-When the drugs wear off, we’ll talk,” he could hear her say, mercifully, as his eyes dropped shut. He wasn’t even able to stay conscious long enough to nod at her.
~~
“Are you sure you’re okay over there? Do you want to give me your crutches?”
“It’s alright-I’ll leave them here. Just put down those boxes for a minute and help me up.”
“Okay.”
There was a clink of metal, then the brush of clothing and skin, the vastness of the room magnifying the soft sounds exponentially.
“Daniel-wait,” It was the gentlest tone that Jack had ever heard Charlotte use. There was a long moment of silence, and Jack kept his eyes shut, realizing what was happening even before he heard the soft, sucking sound that followed.
He tried not to roll his eyes, worried that they might actually hear him if he did.
“Charlotte- I, uh-”
“What sort of cereal did you get?”
“Cereal? Oh. Uh-I-I think it’s mostly Dharma brand: rice crisps, shredded wheat, bran flakes, that kind of thing.”
“What about that red and yellow one?”
“It’s, um, one of those sugary cereals. I don’t remember the name. Let’s see,” Daniel paused, and then read, “Apollo Chocolate Crisps. God, this stuff must be terrible for you.”
“Chocolate? Why didn’t you say so to begin with? Hand it over!”
“Really? You like chocolate cereal?”
“I love chocolate, Dan. I always have. Didn’t you like these when you were a kid?”
“I wasn’t allowed to eat chocolate for breakfast, or-for any other meals either, now that I think about it. My mother was a little-uh, strict-about stuff like that.”
“Well she’s not here to stop you now, is she? Why don’t you try some? It’s delicious. Here-you take the first crack at it-but don’t eat all of it, hey?”
Jack let himself blink slowly now that it seemed like a safe moment to reveal the fact that he was conscious, opening his eyes unpleasantly to the glaring light on the ceiling. He felt a lot better-physically, at least: his side ached a little, but if he didn’t move, he could almost forget that the stitches were there. The memory of his fight with Juliet, however, wasn’t slipping away from him as easily.
When he looked down, he couldn’t see the incision-there was a large gauze bandage taped across his lower abdomen, peeking out from under the thick sheet that was draped over his hips. His chest was bare and half-shaven in what had clearly been an extremely rushed job. Remorse touched him painfully when he imagined the quick, awkward passes Juliet must have had to make with the razor. Her usual precise, careful movements would have been impossible in the limited time she’d had to cut him open.
“Oi, Dan: He’s awake!” Charlotte called suddenly, drawing Jack from his thoughts.
He slowly turned his head in the direction of Charlotte’s voice. She and Daniel were sitting against the wall, their legs dangling from the high metal counter upon which they sat, not long enough to reach the floor.
Charlotte’s calf had been rewrapped in a clean bandage, the area of her leg covered quite a bit larger than it had been before. However, even under the florescent lights of the operating room, she looked better, a lot less pale than she had on the playground. As she pushed her hair behind her ear, Jack could see her father’s silver watch dangling loosely from her wrist. Beside her, an old-fashioned-looking pair of crutches was leaning against the wall.
Charlotte was sitting closely against Daniel, who had just plunged his forearm into a large, colorful box of cereal as though he was digging for a prize at the bottom. Jack recognized his own gun resting in front of the cereal boxes littering the other side of the table.
“Already? That was fast,” Daniel commented, distracted, his hand resting, forgotten, in the middle of the Crisps.
“I knew it. I told Burke she couldn’t possibly have given him too much tranquillizer: he weighs a bloody ton.”
“Where’s Juliet?” Jack blinked at them, trying to stifle the perverse impulse to laugh at them. Not only wasn’t he in the mood for it, but the pain would probably be excruciating.
“She’s taking a nap.”
“Where?”
“Her house.”
“Her house? Are we-”
“Still at Linus’ camp? Yeah.”
“But this room looks just like the operating room on Hydra island.”
“I guess once you’ve seen one Dharma medical facility, you’ve seen them all.”
“And we’re-underground?”
“Yeah: just one floor, thank god, or we never would have made it down here with you.”
For a moment, Jack was distracted by the image that Charlotte had conjured up.
“You two brought me down here,” he mused aloud, trying not to sound as incredulous as he felt.
“We had a stretcher,” Daniel offered, as though it explained everything.
“Why would you do that? Why would you help us? After we followed you, threatened you, questioned you at gunpoint-”
“Just a thought, but are you sure you want to remind us of all that that while you’re lying starkers on an operating table?” Charlotte raised her eyebrows at him, and Jack colored despite himself.
“Charlotte needed medical attention,” Daniel explained, ignoring Charlotte, “Her leg-”
“I needed a gun too, Dan: don’t forget that,” Charlotte said, reaching over Daniel to pick up the weapon in question and tuck it into the front of her trousers.
“Juliet gave you my gun?”
“’Gave’ is putting it a little strongly,” Dan hedged.
“Juliet agreed to play ‘finders keepers’ with us. Besides, she had more important things to mind at the time, like pulling out all your bloody organs. She wasn’t so worried about stockpiling for her arsenal.”
“How long has it been, since Juliet-since the surgery?”
“Not long. Just about-” Charlotte paused halfway through her sentence, and Jack was going to ask her why she had when he realized that he couldn’t speak either, that there was an intense noise filling his ears that sounded like nothing and everything all at once. A impossibly bright light bleached the room, cut through the whole place, and then it was suddenly pitch black.
~~
“Daniel? Charlotte?”
“Jack? What the fuck was that?” He could hear the sound of Charlotte turning off the safety on his gun. Something felt odd about the table on which he’d been lying-it felt uneven, strange beneath him.
“We’re over here,” Daniel added unnecessarily.
“Do either of you two have a flashlight?” When Jack spoke, his voice no longer echoed, but even before he noticed that, he had sensed that something was different about the space around them. For a second, he thought he heard an odd, muffled rumbling coming from the direction of the stairwell.
“I do, actually,” Daniel offered, “It’s here somewhere-”
“Dan, it’s in your pocket, remember?”
“Oh yeah. Here we go.”
It took Jack’s eyes a few seconds to adjust to the light source, to the fuzzy, thick line of dusty white that was connecting him to Charlotte and Daniel. When he could finally see, he noticed black, uneven walls, and rocks hanging from the ceiling, as though he, Charlotte, and Daniel were inside of a cave. The table had vanished underneath him along with the rest of the medical supplies on the table-he was lying on an irregular dark surface, the sheets and his bandage still wrapped around him.
“What the hell-” he began, wanting to push himself upright, but he cringed instinctively at the thought, knowing how painful it would be to move so soon after the surgery.
“What is this?” Charlotte asked, “Some kind of joke? Are we in a-cave? Daniel, what’s going on?”
“I, uh-I’m not sure. This would make more sense if it were happening over the ocean. There’s not supposed to be any displacement occurring on the island itself.”
“Displacement? What does that mean?” Jack asked, his pulse speeding up. Beyond the strangeness of their immediate surroundings, something else was off: he could hear the same low, unidentifiable sound start up again, but couldn’t strain his neck well enough to see where it was coming from.
“What’s that over there, Dan? Put the flashlight over that way: I think I can see something moving.” The light bobbed up and down clumsily. “Not there-to the right. Let me see that-”
“Ow,” Jack heard Daniel say before there was a sharp clattering to his left.
“Damn it, Daniel, my gun!”
“Uh-Charlotte-”
Jack’s eyes followed the new trajectory of the flashlight to what looked like the back of the cave, and his mouth dropped open. Standing just behind a long stalactite, a large, gold and black cheetah was staring at them with yellow eyes. For an instant, Jack didn’t believe it was real. Then it moved, living muscles and fur gleaming under the light, and there was no room left for doubt.
“Fuck!” Charlotte shouted just as it sprung toward them. Before he knew what was he was doing, Jack threw his arm out, trying desperately to remember where the sound had come from when Charlotte’s gun had fallen. Taking a deep, almost suicidal breath, he took a guess and lunged for it, his insides exploding just as his hand closed around the weapon.
“Jack!” Daniel was yelling. There was no time. Aiming as well as he could in the split second it took to move the gun, he began pulling the trigger.
The shots were deafening. He thought he could hear the body of the animal hitting the floor of the cave after the third, but he didn’t stop firing until the fifth. Then he dropped his arm, unable to hold it the weapon up any longer. He was lying flat out on the rock, breathing hard, feeling as if he’d just been impaled. When he had the presence of mind to look down, he could see blood soaking heavily through the bandage on his abdomen.
“Jack? Are you alright?” He could hear Charlotte say. Then the flashlight moved toward him suddenly, blinding him. He squinted until he could just make out the anthropologist’s dark silhouette behind the light.
“Yeah. You guys still playing ‘finders keepers”?” he panted, looking down at the gun in his hand.
~~
Part Eight
Characters: Juliet, Jack, Charlotte, Daniel, Hurley, Bernard & Rose (so far)
Pairing: Juliet/Jack, hints of Charlotte/Daniel
Rating: R (sex, language)
Spoilers: Season 4
A/N: Remember when I said I couldn’t write douche!Jack? It turns out that I was kind of just kidding about that. A slightly toned-down version of self-destructive Jack makes a brief appearance in this part (I just had to do it!), but don’t worry: he won’t stick around for long! Comments are ♥!
~~
When he opened his eyes again, he was not surprised to find himself in a familiar operating room, the ugly green flicker of the fluorescent lights above him already making him feel sick to his stomach. Juliet was standing above him, adjusting a clear drip that was feeding into his arm: she hadn’t yet noticed that he was awake.
He moved slightly and felt the stitches pulling, wiring tight inside him. The pain was intolerable; he felt like a corpse. Reluctantly, he forced himself to take a few breaths in and out, trying to make use of the oppressive grey air around them.
“Why didn’t you leave?” He croaked. His voice echoed strangely in the cavernous room.
She let go of the drip.
“Jack,” she turned to him, the blue in her eyes leaping out at him with relief. She stroked the side of his face, and despite his anger, despite everything that had happened, he couldn’t help closing his eyes when he felt the soft pressure of her gloved palm against his jaw.
“How are you feeling?” she asked. Two cool fingers were slipping down to find his pulse.
With some difficulty, he raised his hand to her forearm. He had meant to catch hold of it suddenly to get her attention, but he found his fingers loosening and sliding down her arm, following the delicate blue veins that ran from elbow to wrist. The question he’d wanted to scream dissolved into a whisper.
“Why didn’t you leave?”
“Hey,” she smiled at him, running a hand through his hair, “It’s ok. You’re still out of it from the drugs. Just relax for a minute and we can talk.”
“No-I’m not-I’m not out of it,” he shook his head, swallowing hard. “I gave you Shannon’s name. You had time: you could have made it. Why didn’t you go?”
Her finger slipped from his throat, his pulse forgotten.
“Jack,” she looked down at him, “You can’t be serious.”
He only looked back at her insistently.
“Your appendix was rupturing-did you think I was going to leave you here to die?
“I told-I asked you to.” He took a deep breath, “You should have.”
“What? That’s ridiculous.” He realized that she was pulling her arm from his, and reluctantly, he let go of her wrist. “We are not going to have this conversation right now: you’ve just come through surgery-you don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Your sister needed you-and you had a chance: Ben was gone; Locke was on the other side of the island. You had a f-You had a gun, Juliet. Nobody would’ve been able to stop you.” He could actually see the image of her clear path as if it were still before them.
“I-Jack, I couldn’t-”
“Don’t you get it, Juliet? This isn’t the real world: That is. Life on this island-my life-isn’t worth saving-especially when it means giving up on your-”
“Don’t, Jack-” She paused, shaking, “Don’t you dare tell me what’s real. I just-” Her voice caught on the word, struggled there for a long moment. “I just gave up my only chance of seeing my sister to save you.”
Her mouth hung open after she had finished speaking as though she’d only just understood what she had said. As she lowered her face under the light, he could suddenly see the redness of her eyes, the strain in her face, the way her gloved hands were trembling against the table. Finally, she closed her mouth, moving jerkily back to the saline to untangle the cord. She didn’t look at him as she finished, peeling off the gloves (a streak of his own blood on the back of one glistening, momentarily, over her knuckles) and dropping them into the bin at her feet.
“Juliet-” He whispered, feeling his anger recede like the tide, leaving him disoriented and miserable in its wake. The fantasy was still playing brokenly before him like the memory of something that had happened in another life: Juliet mounting the helicopter in the distance, flying away from this (three-year) nightmare, to her sister.
When he’d been lying in the grass on the playground, not knowing whether she’d gone, all he had been able to think was that it would have been worth it-all of his missteps and failures-to see that helicopter fading against the sky and to know that she was on it. He had wished for her escape almost harder than he had wished for his own.
Yet a moment ago, when Juliet had placed her warm hand against his face, the picture of that dream had faded, false and cold around him. Throbbing so close to him that it was more like a bodily pain than a feeling, a traitorous, irrepressible joy had sprung up inside him, refusing to remain buried: Relief.
That she had chosen to stay.
That she hadn’t left him.
Juliet didn’t respond to her name, moving around the table slowly, oblivious to his realization; when she spoke again, her voice was neutral, colorless, as her eyes followed the lines etched on the table.
“I gave you some oxycodone about half an hour ago: it should start to kick in soon. Charlotte and Daniel will be back in five minutes: tell them if you feel lightheaded or if the stitches start hurting more than they should. I’ll come back later, to change your bandages.” Her bare hand stretched out to touch him, hovering over his arm, but at the last minute, she pulled away. “I should-I have to go now-”
The medicine was already beginning to work: he could feel it in his veins flowing freely, smoothing the jagged lines in him, taking away all his anger, leaving only the regret.
“Juliet-” he slurred, unable to make it sound the way he wanted. Sorry.
“We’ll-When the drugs wear off, we’ll talk,” he could hear her say, mercifully, as his eyes dropped shut. He wasn’t even able to stay conscious long enough to nod at her.
~~
“Are you sure you’re okay over there? Do you want to give me your crutches?”
“It’s alright-I’ll leave them here. Just put down those boxes for a minute and help me up.”
“Okay.”
There was a clink of metal, then the brush of clothing and skin, the vastness of the room magnifying the soft sounds exponentially.
“Daniel-wait,” It was the gentlest tone that Jack had ever heard Charlotte use. There was a long moment of silence, and Jack kept his eyes shut, realizing what was happening even before he heard the soft, sucking sound that followed.
He tried not to roll his eyes, worried that they might actually hear him if he did.
“Charlotte- I, uh-”
“What sort of cereal did you get?”
“Cereal? Oh. Uh-I-I think it’s mostly Dharma brand: rice crisps, shredded wheat, bran flakes, that kind of thing.”
“What about that red and yellow one?”
“It’s, um, one of those sugary cereals. I don’t remember the name. Let’s see,” Daniel paused, and then read, “Apollo Chocolate Crisps. God, this stuff must be terrible for you.”
“Chocolate? Why didn’t you say so to begin with? Hand it over!”
“Really? You like chocolate cereal?”
“I love chocolate, Dan. I always have. Didn’t you like these when you were a kid?”
“I wasn’t allowed to eat chocolate for breakfast, or-for any other meals either, now that I think about it. My mother was a little-uh, strict-about stuff like that.”
“Well she’s not here to stop you now, is she? Why don’t you try some? It’s delicious. Here-you take the first crack at it-but don’t eat all of it, hey?”
Jack let himself blink slowly now that it seemed like a safe moment to reveal the fact that he was conscious, opening his eyes unpleasantly to the glaring light on the ceiling. He felt a lot better-physically, at least: his side ached a little, but if he didn’t move, he could almost forget that the stitches were there. The memory of his fight with Juliet, however, wasn’t slipping away from him as easily.
When he looked down, he couldn’t see the incision-there was a large gauze bandage taped across his lower abdomen, peeking out from under the thick sheet that was draped over his hips. His chest was bare and half-shaven in what had clearly been an extremely rushed job. Remorse touched him painfully when he imagined the quick, awkward passes Juliet must have had to make with the razor. Her usual precise, careful movements would have been impossible in the limited time she’d had to cut him open.
“Oi, Dan: He’s awake!” Charlotte called suddenly, drawing Jack from his thoughts.
He slowly turned his head in the direction of Charlotte’s voice. She and Daniel were sitting against the wall, their legs dangling from the high metal counter upon which they sat, not long enough to reach the floor.
Charlotte’s calf had been rewrapped in a clean bandage, the area of her leg covered quite a bit larger than it had been before. However, even under the florescent lights of the operating room, she looked better, a lot less pale than she had on the playground. As she pushed her hair behind her ear, Jack could see her father’s silver watch dangling loosely from her wrist. Beside her, an old-fashioned-looking pair of crutches was leaning against the wall.
Charlotte was sitting closely against Daniel, who had just plunged his forearm into a large, colorful box of cereal as though he was digging for a prize at the bottom. Jack recognized his own gun resting in front of the cereal boxes littering the other side of the table.
“Already? That was fast,” Daniel commented, distracted, his hand resting, forgotten, in the middle of the Crisps.
“I knew it. I told Burke she couldn’t possibly have given him too much tranquillizer: he weighs a bloody ton.”
“Where’s Juliet?” Jack blinked at them, trying to stifle the perverse impulse to laugh at them. Not only wasn’t he in the mood for it, but the pain would probably be excruciating.
“She’s taking a nap.”
“Where?”
“Her house.”
“Her house? Are we-”
“Still at Linus’ camp? Yeah.”
“But this room looks just like the operating room on Hydra island.”
“I guess once you’ve seen one Dharma medical facility, you’ve seen them all.”
“And we’re-underground?”
“Yeah: just one floor, thank god, or we never would have made it down here with you.”
For a moment, Jack was distracted by the image that Charlotte had conjured up.
“You two brought me down here,” he mused aloud, trying not to sound as incredulous as he felt.
“We had a stretcher,” Daniel offered, as though it explained everything.
“Why would you do that? Why would you help us? After we followed you, threatened you, questioned you at gunpoint-”
“Just a thought, but are you sure you want to remind us of all that that while you’re lying starkers on an operating table?” Charlotte raised her eyebrows at him, and Jack colored despite himself.
“Charlotte needed medical attention,” Daniel explained, ignoring Charlotte, “Her leg-”
“I needed a gun too, Dan: don’t forget that,” Charlotte said, reaching over Daniel to pick up the weapon in question and tuck it into the front of her trousers.
“Juliet gave you my gun?”
“’Gave’ is putting it a little strongly,” Dan hedged.
“Juliet agreed to play ‘finders keepers’ with us. Besides, she had more important things to mind at the time, like pulling out all your bloody organs. She wasn’t so worried about stockpiling for her arsenal.”
“How long has it been, since Juliet-since the surgery?”
“Not long. Just about-” Charlotte paused halfway through her sentence, and Jack was going to ask her why she had when he realized that he couldn’t speak either, that there was an intense noise filling his ears that sounded like nothing and everything all at once. A impossibly bright light bleached the room, cut through the whole place, and then it was suddenly pitch black.
~~
“Daniel? Charlotte?”
“Jack? What the fuck was that?” He could hear the sound of Charlotte turning off the safety on his gun. Something felt odd about the table on which he’d been lying-it felt uneven, strange beneath him.
“We’re over here,” Daniel added unnecessarily.
“Do either of you two have a flashlight?” When Jack spoke, his voice no longer echoed, but even before he noticed that, he had sensed that something was different about the space around them. For a second, he thought he heard an odd, muffled rumbling coming from the direction of the stairwell.
“I do, actually,” Daniel offered, “It’s here somewhere-”
“Dan, it’s in your pocket, remember?”
“Oh yeah. Here we go.”
It took Jack’s eyes a few seconds to adjust to the light source, to the fuzzy, thick line of dusty white that was connecting him to Charlotte and Daniel. When he could finally see, he noticed black, uneven walls, and rocks hanging from the ceiling, as though he, Charlotte, and Daniel were inside of a cave. The table had vanished underneath him along with the rest of the medical supplies on the table-he was lying on an irregular dark surface, the sheets and his bandage still wrapped around him.
“What the hell-” he began, wanting to push himself upright, but he cringed instinctively at the thought, knowing how painful it would be to move so soon after the surgery.
“What is this?” Charlotte asked, “Some kind of joke? Are we in a-cave? Daniel, what’s going on?”
“I, uh-I’m not sure. This would make more sense if it were happening over the ocean. There’s not supposed to be any displacement occurring on the island itself.”
“Displacement? What does that mean?” Jack asked, his pulse speeding up. Beyond the strangeness of their immediate surroundings, something else was off: he could hear the same low, unidentifiable sound start up again, but couldn’t strain his neck well enough to see where it was coming from.
“What’s that over there, Dan? Put the flashlight over that way: I think I can see something moving.” The light bobbed up and down clumsily. “Not there-to the right. Let me see that-”
“Ow,” Jack heard Daniel say before there was a sharp clattering to his left.
“Damn it, Daniel, my gun!”
“Uh-Charlotte-”
Jack’s eyes followed the new trajectory of the flashlight to what looked like the back of the cave, and his mouth dropped open. Standing just behind a long stalactite, a large, gold and black cheetah was staring at them with yellow eyes. For an instant, Jack didn’t believe it was real. Then it moved, living muscles and fur gleaming under the light, and there was no room left for doubt.
“Fuck!” Charlotte shouted just as it sprung toward them. Before he knew what was he was doing, Jack threw his arm out, trying desperately to remember where the sound had come from when Charlotte’s gun had fallen. Taking a deep, almost suicidal breath, he took a guess and lunged for it, his insides exploding just as his hand closed around the weapon.
“Jack!” Daniel was yelling. There was no time. Aiming as well as he could in the split second it took to move the gun, he began pulling the trigger.
The shots were deafening. He thought he could hear the body of the animal hitting the floor of the cave after the third, but he didn’t stop firing until the fifth. Then he dropped his arm, unable to hold it the weapon up any longer. He was lying flat out on the rock, breathing hard, feeling as if he’d just been impaled. When he had the presence of mind to look down, he could see blood soaking heavily through the bandage on his abdomen.
“Jack? Are you alright?” He could hear Charlotte say. Then the flashlight moved toward him suddenly, blinding him. He squinted until he could just make out the anthropologist’s dark silhouette behind the light.
“Yeah. You guys still playing ‘finders keepers”?” he panted, looking down at the gun in his hand.
~~
Part Eight