Chapter 02 - Force Majeure (Patreon)

He knew the sound before he opened his eyes.

It was a jet engine turning over with nothing to push against, with a high rising whine underneath it, and under that the surf and a woman screaming one word over and over, a name he'd heard sixty-seven days ago and had never managed to forget. There was sand against his cheek, and the air smelled of jet fuel and burning plastic and salt. Elliott Maslow lay on his side on a beach he knew better than any place he had ever lived and understood, before he had moved a muscle, that he was going to have to do all of it again.

The last thing he remembered was the boat, with the lagoon falling away behind him and the motor coughing and Locke on the dock with a rifle, telling him his purpose was off the island. There had been open water, and a hum in his ears that came from nowhere, and a radio crackling with a voice he couldn't make out, and then he'd looked up and seen a plane, high and silver, coming apart in a clear blue sky. He had known which plane it was, because he had been on it.

And then there had been this, the sand and the engine and the screaming, and it was day one again.

When he opened his eyes and sat up, his body did what it had learned to do in two months on this island, which was to start a list before his head had caught up.

There was a fuel leak under the fuselage, starboard side, aft of the wing root, and the wing itself, which would come down in about forty minutes, and the engine. Jack would be doing CPR on a woman in a green blouse. The pregnant girl, Claire, would have contractions that turned out not to be, and Charlie would freeze under the wing until somebody yelled at him, and Locke would be sitting in the sand, looking at his feet as if they belonged to someone else. Somewhere in the trees there would be a dog.

Eight steps toward the fuselage, and the sky made a sound that wasn't on the list.

It came from the north, down the length of the beach, and it was so loud that people who had been screaming stopped. It was a second plane, a big one, an old wide-bodied jet painted in loud colors with patches of bare metal showing through, trailing smoke and pieces of itself, coming in low and crooked over the water. It hit the sand half a mile up the beach and plowed a furrow through it, throwing up a wall of wet sand and spray, and kept going, and stopped with its nose in the surf and its tail cocked up at the sky. Something on it caught fire. Somebody on it, impossibly, started yelling about a camera.

Elliott stood still on the sand. There had been no second plane. He had stood on this beach for sixty-seven days and walked every foot of it, and there had been one wreck and one fire and one crowd, and he would have remembered a jumbo jet in the surf.

For three or four seconds he stood there with the list in his head and the evidence in front of him that the list was wrong, and in those seconds a man near him was knocked flat by somebody running past, and a burning seat cushion landed in the sand a yard from his feet, and the woman screaming the name finally stopped. Then the smell of the fuel reached him, sharp and sweet, and his body went back to work without asking him.

The leak was where it had been last time, aft of the wing root on the starboard side, a severed line weeping fuel into a widening dark patch of sand that ran downhill toward a burning hunk of the overhead bins. He went under the fuselage on his back, where it was hot and loud and the metal ticked above his face, and found the valve where it had been. The first time, with no memory of his own name, it had taken him ten minutes to find it, and today it took him less than one. He put his weight on the wheel and turned it until it stopped, and the dripping slowed and then stopped.

The engine took the man while Elliott was still lying there under the plane with his hand on the valve.

It had been coming since he woke up: a man in a dark shirt standing too close to the turbine, backing away from something else, not looking behind him. Gary Troup, the manifest had said later, the first time through; a writer, though nobody on the beach had known it. Elliott heard the change in the turbine's pitch as it took him in, and then the explosion, and felt it through the metal over his face, and heard the screaming start up again. His hand stayed on the valve until his breathing was something he could control. He'd had a list, and he'd been where he was. Then he rolled out from under the fuselage and stood up and looked for the next thing.

The wing came next. He walked toward it without hurrying, because people notice a man running. Two people were sitting directly under it: a heavyset man in his fifties with a gash over his eye and a woman holding a cloth to it. Elliott crouched beside them and said they needed to move into the shade, there was water by the trees, he'd help them up, it was all right. He talked the whole way, the low steady stream of nothing he'd learned in field hospitals in places that weren't on most maps, while the man leaned on him and the woman carried their bag. He sat them down at the edge of the trees, and he had turned around and taken four steps back toward the fuselage when a long metal shriek came down the beach and the wing tore off its last mountings and came down across the sand where they had been sitting.

Nobody looked at him, because nobody had seen it coming. He had learned that too: if you did it right, nobody knew there had been anything to do.

That was the afternoon. Wherever what he remembered matched what was in front of him, he moved. He moved for the wing and the bins and the boy with the broken arm behind the luggage pile, and for the place in the sand where a piece of the cabin would slide when the tide got under it. Wherever it didn't match, he stopped and looked, and there was a great deal that didn't match.

There were two groups of teenagers in two different karate jackets, keeping a careful twenty feet apart from each other while they dragged suitcases out of the surf. There were a dozen kids his newspaper would have called "fresh-faced," holding hands in a circle around a girl with a bloody leg, singing to her, all of them, in harmony, on purpose. There was a redheaded girl in red from head to toe giving orders to three boys who were following them, and a man with impossible hair, a beautiful suit and a microphone, standing on a piece of the second plane's wing and shouting at a cameraman who was filming him.

And there was a girl in a grey hoodie standing just above the tide line with an instant camera to her eye, taking a picture of the fire.

The girl caught his eye because she was doing it right. She had moved to get the dark wreck between herself and the sun, so the fire would read against it; she waited for the smoke to lift; she took one picture, not ten. Then she lowered the camera and stood looking at the fire with her own eyes, as if the picture had been the easy part. A girl with blue hair came up and put an arm around her shoulders and said something, and the girl in the hoodie shook her head and didn't answer.

None of them had been here. After walking this beach every day for two months, he could have named half the people on it in the dark: Arzt, standing in the shade telling people about tides; Shannon, sitting on a suitcase with her knees pulled up and refusing to help, and Boone trying to make her; Hurley, red in the face, carrying water and saying dude to everyone; Sawyer, already going through a bag that wasn't his. None of them knew him, which had been true the first time too, but it felt different now that he knew all of them.

These other people, the singing kids and the karate kids and the man with the hair and the girl with the camera, he couldn't name at all, because they hadn't been on the plane or on this beach. As far as Elliott knew, they hadn't been anywhere.

Around three in the afternoon, he saw the big man.

Elliott was by the debris near the fuselage, helping a teenage boy with a broken wrist get out of the sun, when two voices started arguing in the way only teenage boys argue, all volume and no breath. There were two of them, from the second plane, a tall kid in a red tracksuit and a red headband, and a shorter one with a green mohawk and a ring through his eyebrow. They had their hands under a long section of fuselage skin that had come down across a man's legs, and they were pulling at it and calling each other weak.

Elliott knew the man under it, though he didn't know his name, and as far as he knew nobody ever had. Jack had put a tourniquet on him the first time, and Elliott had seen him around camp for weeks after that, on crutches, then walking, a quiet man who kept to himself and never told anyone his name. He'd thought of him the way everyone did, by what had happened to him.

The first time, it had taken Jack and three other men to lift that piece of fuselage, and there had been no boy in a red tracksuit.

A man came out of the trees.

Big was the first thing, and it took a moment to see past it: he was a good six two, heavy through the shoulders and arms in a way that didn't come from a gym, with a beard he'd let go for months and dark hair grown down past his ears, and he wore a faded cyan T-shirt and blue jeans and had no injuries Elliott could see. The man walked down the sand to the two arguing boys without hurrying, and bent between them, and put his hands under the edge of the fuselage skin, and lifted it.

There was no heave in it. Elliott had seen men lift heavy things, had photographed them, soldiers and dockhands and a woman in Grozny who had pulled her brother out from under a fallen wall with her bare hands and screamed the whole time she did it. This wasn't that. The big man lifted the section as if it were a door off its hinges, a thing with some weight to it that needed a little care, and walked two steps to the side and set it down on the sand, flat, so it wouldn't tip.

The two boys stared at him, and so did Elliott.

Jack came in fast, the way Jack came to everything, down on his knees by the man's legs with his belt already coming out of its loops. Elliott watched him cinch it, watched him look up at the big man and hand him the end of it and show him how hard to hold. The big man knelt and held it exactly the way he'd been shown, absolutely still, looking at the leg as if it were a problem he meant to solve.

Elliott ran down the manifest in his head. He had read all three hundred and twenty-four names the first time, sitting in the hatch with Sayid, to prove his own was on it, and for days afterward he had matched names to faces around the camp. There had been no face like this one on the beach, not in the first week and not in the second month. A man like that, you'd remember, and a man like that would have been carrying people up the beach the first time too.

The big man looked up, then, and across the sand, and right at him.

Elliott looked back, without knowing what was on his own face. Whatever it was, the big man studied it with no expression Elliott could read, a direct, open, unguarded look, like a child's or an animal's, and then he looked back down at the leg.

Lisa found him a little after four.

Ever since he woke he had known she was here, and he had felt it all day like a bad tooth, something in the jaw, waiting. He hadn't looked for her. Every time a woman with dark hair crossed the edge of his vision he had turned and found something to carry.

"There you are." She came at him across the sand with her shoes in her hand, sunburned already across the nose, a cut on her forearm that somebody had wrapped in what looked like a necktie. "Romeo. I've been up and down this whole beach. I thought you were in the water. I thought you were dead, I thought..."

A yard from him she stopped, because he hadn't said anything, and because he was looking at the cut on her arm instead of at her.

"Elliott."

"You're all right," he said.

"I'm fine. It's a scratch. I'm fine." She looked at him. "You look like hell."

"It's been a day."

"It's been an hour." She put her shoes down in the sand and put both hands on his face and turned it, looking for injuries, the way she did when she was frightened and didn't want him to know. Her hands were warm and gritty with sand, and he let her, looking over her shoulder at the fire. "No blood. Okay. Okay. God. Do you know what I was thinking about, on the way down? When the oxygen masks dropped? I was thinking, we made the flight. After all of that, after the hotel, we actually made the flight, and this is how..."

"Lisa."

"What?"

There was no answer. He had a list for everything on this beach, and there was nothing on it for this, because the last time he had stood here she had already been dead, on a white carpet in a hotel in Sydney.

"There's water up at the tree line," he said. "Go and get some, and sit in the shade. Stay out of the sun. I'll find you."

She took her hands off his face. "That's it?"

"I'll find you."

Lisa looked at him the way she used to look at a source who'd said something true by accident, steady and narrow, deciding whether to push. "You're being weird," she said. "Even for you." But she picked up her shoes. "Tree line. Fine. Come and find me, Romeo, or I swear to God."

Up the sand she went, without looking back. She had never looked back; it was one of the things he had liked about her, from the start.

Sydney. Before.

The Opal Suite smelled of cut lilies and cigarettes. Elliott was behind a louvered closet door with his camera against the slats, breathing through his mouth, and through the slats he could see the room in strips.

Zoran Savo sat on the white sofa in his shirtsleeves, across from a man in a grey suit with an aluminum case open on the glass table between them. Inside the case, set in foam, were six steel canisters with a yellow stencil that Elliott couldn't read at that distance and didn't need to. The man in the grey suit was named Mittelwerk. Elliott had learned that from a pawnbroker named Rico, in exchange for three pictures he wasn't proud of.

There was the photograph, with Savo's hand on the case and Mittelwerk's hand on the money and both their faces in the frame. He held the shutter down and the camera took four more, very soft, the way he'd modified it to.

It was the one you could go your whole career without getting.

Elliott was still holding his breath over it when the suite door opened and Savo's man came in, the one with the small pale eyes, pushing a woman ahead of him with a hand on the back of her neck.

An hour ago, Lisa had tried to get past the bodyguard at the elevator with a smile and a story about the wrong floor, which had been her plan, and it hadn't worked. And Elliott, who had been standing ten feet behind her with the camera in his bag, had walked up to the bodyguard himself and told him, low, that the woman was a journalist. The bodyguard had taken her by the arm and walked her away down the corridor, and Elliott had stepped into the elevator, and the doors had closed.

They would throw her out of the hotel, he had told himself.

Savo stood up and asked her, politely, who she was working with, and she told him she worked alone. He asked again, with a gun in his hand this time, held loosely at his side, and she looked at it and then at him and told him the same thing, in the same voice, and didn't look at the closet, not once, though she had to know he was in there. She kept her eyes on Savo.

Savo asked a third time.

Elliott's finger was on the shutter, and he didn't remember putting it there.

The shot was very loud in the small room, and the camera went off with it, and Lisa went down onto the white carpet between the sofa and the glass table and didn't move, and Savo's head turned toward the closet door.

Finding the next thing to carry took him longer than it should have.

At a little after five, crossing the camp with a case of bottled water from the galley, he saw Savo's man, and stopped walking.

The man was standing by the luggage pile at the far end of camp, alone, with one hand wrapped in a stained strip of shirt. He was narrow, in a dark polo shirt, and forgettable except for the eyes, which were small and pale and set close together and moved over the crowd in steady passes like a lighthouse. The first time, Elliott had called him Beady Eyes in his own head before he remembered where he had seen him. The first time, the man had survived the crash with a cut hand and a camera to find, and had gone into the jungle the first night, and come out of it after dark to try to take a camera off a man with no memory.

His eyes came across the camp on their steady pass and stopped on Elliott, and the two of them looked at each other across sixty yards of sand and wreckage and people.

The first time, Elliott hadn't known him. Elliott had stood here with no name and no past and no idea that the man with the pale eyes had flown halfway across the Pacific to kill him, and he had spent two months afraid of a face he couldn't place. This time he knew him well enough to know which hand he favored, and where he'd go, and what he'd do there, and how he'd die. Elliott knew that last part best. He had been the one to do it, at the Flame, at the end of the first time, with a pistol and without hesitating, after two months of running.

Elliott didn't look away, because he had learned how not to.

Standing there with the case of water in his arms, he thought about it seriously: sixty yards, a man with a cut hand, a beach full of frightened people who would only see one survivor attacking another. He had no gun. There had been one, the first time, in the marshal's metal briefcase, and it had turned up somewhere on this island in the first few days, and somebody had found it. Back then he'd been a man with no memory, trying to remember his own name, with no attention left for anything else. Where the case was now, or who would have it, he had no idea.

Beady Eyes held the look. His eyes narrowed a fraction, like a man whose dog hasn't backed down when he expected it to. Then his gaze moved on and the steady pass resumed, because as far as he knew he was looking at a photojournalist who'd last seen him from a hotel stairwell in Sydney. A man in shock might stare, and might not know enough to be afraid.

Beady Eyes moved off soon after that, not toward Elliott but toward the trees, the way he'd gone the first time, keeping to the edge of the crowd, unhurried, like a man looking for somewhere to relieve himself. At the tree line he looked once over his shoulder, straight back at Elliott, who was still watching, and stepped into the shade, and the jungle closed behind him.

That night Elliott made sure that Lisa was sitting at the fire nearest the water, with her back to the sea, with at least forty people between her and the trees.

By the time the sun was low the wounded were in the shade and the fires were lit, and people had stopped running, and so they started talking.

It started near the luggage pile. Arzt was explaining to anyone who would listen that the other plane had clipped them, that he'd seen it with his own eyes out the window, its wingtip right there. A man next to him said he'd seen it too, and a woman said she'd felt the bump, and then a woman who said she'd felt the bump started crying, and a man with his arm in a sling said somebody ought to go up the beach and ask those people what the hell their pilot thought he was doing.

Up the beach, on the other side of the line nobody had drawn but everybody seemed to be keeping, the man with the impossible hair was telling his cameraman and anyone else in earshot that Oceanic Airlines was about to discover the meaning of the word lawsuit. "We were in our airspace! Our licensed airspace! And then this thing comes out of nowhere and plows into us like..."

Elliott stood by a fire between the two groups with his hands in his pockets.

Nothing had hit anything, because Oceanic 815 had come apart in the air on its own, the first time, without any help, at thirty thousand feet, over this island. He had stood in the hatch in front of the counter and the sealed room under it, and he had a fair idea why. There had been no other plane to blame then, but now there was one, and everybody on both ends of the beach had seen it come down at the same moment theirs had, and that was all the proof most people needed of anything.

There was no way to tell them, either, because there was no answer to how do you know, Elliott? He'd been asked that question on this beach the first time, by Jack and by Sayid and by Kate, about things he'd known for good reasons. He hadn't had good answers then either.

So he went to find Jack.

Jack was kneeling over Tourniquet Man in the shade, checking the belt, checking the toes of the foot below it, his face lit orange on one side by a fire. He had a flashlight in his teeth, and he didn't look up when Elliott crouched down on the other side.

"How's he doing?"

Jack took the flashlight out of his mouth. "He'll keep the leg, if I can get that belt off in the next couple of hours and nothing's dead under it." He pressed a thumbnail into the man's big toe, watched the color come back. "He's lucky. That section was on him for a while."

"I saw who got it off him."

"Mm."

"The big guy. Blue shirt, beard." Elliott kept his voice easy, interested, the voice he used to get a soldier at a checkpoint to tell him which road was mined. "Those two kids couldn't move it. He picked it up on his own and carried it."

"Adrenaline," Jack said. He was already looking at the next thing, a dressing on the man's hand, peeling up the tape at one corner. "You'd be amazed. Mothers lifting cars off their kids. It's real. People do things they shouldn't be able to, when they have to." He set the tape back down. "Do me a favor? There's a kid by the third fire, broken wrist, splinted. Make sure he's drinking water."

That was all. Jack had already gone back to the work, and Elliott could see that he wasn't going to think about it again.

Elliott went and made sure the kid with the wrist was drinking water, and then he stood at the edge of the firelight and looked for the big man. He went from fire to fire and face to face, twice around the camp, and the big man wasn't anywhere on the beach, and nobody had seen him go.

Elliott had seen adrenaline. He'd seen the woman in Grozny, and soldiers coming back from things nobody should come back from, and himself, running down a hotel stairwell in Sydney with a gunman two flights behind him and not remembering a single stair. Adrenaline looked like that: the face pulled back, the noise, the shaking afterward, the body paying for it. The big man had picked up a section of an airplane like he was moving furniture, and then he had knelt and held a belt in the sand, and his hands hadn't shaken at all.

The Monster came after dark, from the west, from deep in the jungle, the way it had the first time.

That much he'd expected. After that first night he'd heard it from close up more than once, and he had stood in front of it in a clearing in the dark territory with nothing in his hands and let it look at him until it went away, and none of that helped now. When the ticking started out in the trees, that sound like a giant clockwork being wound, and the first tree went over with a crack like a rifle, his heart went into his throat as if he were hearing it for the first time, and he had to hold on to the log he was sitting on.

The beach woke up screaming. People stood up from the fires and backed toward the water, toward the light, everybody facing the same way: west, toward the jungle, toward the falling trees. He found Lisa in the crowd at the water's edge and stood next to her, and she grabbed his hand without looking at him.

The sound moved away into the island, the way it had the first time, and got fainter and stopped, and nobody sat back down.

Then something went off at the north end of the beach.

It wasn't loud, set against what they'd just heard. A single flat bang, up where the tree line met the sand beyond the second plane, and a flash, orange-white, there and gone among the trunks. A smell came down the beach on the wind a few seconds later, burnt and sharp, like a firework, like something he couldn't place.

People flinched, and a few of them shouted, but all of them were still looking west, at the place where the trees had been falling, and in the dark and the noise and the fear, one bang in the jungle was the same as another. He heard a man near him say it's coming back and a woman tell him to shut up.

Elliott was looking north, because that hadn't happened. He had been on this beach the first night, and there had been the Monster and the trees and the long hours of nobody sleeping and then the dawn, but there had been no bang and no flash, and nothing at the north end of the beach at all except sand.

Lisa's hand was still in his, and he didn't let go of it until it was light.

At first light he walked north.

The second plane looked worse by day: a cracked fuselage in loud paint, a cameraman asleep sitting up against its landing gear with the camera in his lap, a heap of teenagers under a tarp. Past it, the camp ended, and the sand started to rise toward the trees.

The crater was at the tree line between two palms, about the size of a small car, scooped out of the earth as cleanly as if it had been dug with a shovel and still smoking a little at the bottom. The dirt around its rim was scorched black in a ring, and some of it was oddly shaped. He crouched and picked up a clod of it, and it had straight edges, like a brick of earth that had been cut and then broken, and he turned it over in his fingers and couldn't make it be anything else.

Up the slope in the grey light, a long way up through the trunks, there was a place where the jungle stopped too evenly, as if somebody had trimmed it along a ruler. It hadn't been there yesterday, or he hadn't seen it, and it hadn't been there in sixty-seven days. While he was looking at it, something moved up there.

The big man came down through the trees, slowly, one hand pressed flat to his side under the cyan shirt. There was dirt in his hair and his beard, and he walked carefully, the way men walk when something inside them has been knocked loose, and when he came out onto the sand he stopped and looked down at the crater, and then up, and saw Elliott crouched on the far side of it with a clod of square earth in his hand.

Neither of them said anything. Down the beach, the camp was beginning to wake, with somebody coughing, somebody calling a name, the first thin smoke going up from the fires. Nobody else was looking this way.

The big man looked at him for a moment longer, with that same open face, and then he walked past the crater and down the beach toward the camp, holding his side, as if he had every right to be there.