Chapter 4

We were approaching the treeline when it happened.

Robyn felt it first. That happy, giddy, excited smile vanished from her face in an instant, her pace slowed, and the possessive grip she was holding on my arm relaxed before falling away completely. Hannah and Katie were a few paces ahead of us and didn’t seem to notice, but Hayley and I did, turning to look at her curiously as she brought her hand to her head, cringing a little.

“Are you okay, baby?” Hayley asked, breaking away from me and stepping closer to her.

“I ... I don’t know, my head hurts,” she mumbled, wincing a little harder and letting out a soft, whimpered groan of pain.

“Shall I go get Amy?” I asked in concern and stepping closer to her.I barely noticed the slight ringing in my ears. Hannah and Katie had noticed by now as well and had turned around, starting to make their way back toward us.

Suddenly, Robyn screamed out, her hands clutching at the sides of her head as she fell to her knees. Another scream burst through the air from further down the beach. I barely had enough time to glance toward a concerned-looking Tom standing over a crumpled-looking Louisa when it hit me too.

The subtle ringing in my ears suddenly grew. In only a few seconds, it felt - and sounded - like there was a swarm of angry insects buzzing around inside my skull. A headache grew out of nowhere; a sudden spike in what must have been my blood pressure made it feel like my eyeballs were being forced out of my head. My stomach lurched, my eyesight blurred, and it felt like the entire island was spinning. I vaguely managed to make out Hayley dropping to her knees beside me and, beyond her, Hannah and Katie holding their heads and falling too. Their air was filled with screams of agony. The pressure and the pain in my head kept building and building, the buzzing kept getting louder, and my eyes swam. My knees finally gave out from underneath me. I hit the sand, and the world went dark,

I couldn’t tell you how long I was out, but the first thing I became aware of was the throaty groan coming from my lips. Apparently, the rest of my head wasn’t as enamored with the idea of being conscious again as I was. My vision slowly cleared as I opened my eyes, and I instinctively squinted to shield them from the blazing sun, only to find that there wasn’t one.

It had been late morning when we passed out, but the fading light and the sun low on the Western horizon told me that it was at least early evening now. More than that, the grass and red flowers around my head and the roaring sound of the waterfall told me that I wasn’t still on the beach where we had collapsed. Feeling a little disorientated, I sat myself up.

The briefest thought that I had been dragged to the waterfall from the beach, maybe to make giving me water easier, vanished in an instant as I looked around. Everyone was here, all twelve of us, and so far, I was the only one awake. Whatever had happened to the five of us seemed to have happened to everyone else as well. The memory of Louisa’s scream echoed through my still-ringing ears.

I was still feeling far too dizzy to trust my feet, but after scanning the area and finding the yellow locks of our blonde Doctor, I dragged myself onto my knees and crawled toward Amy. Every thud of my hands or knees hitting the ground, felt like an overzealous blacksmith was using my head as an anvil, and time seemed to slow down. To my mind, it took an inordinate number of very unpleasant minutes to cross the twenty feet or so from where I woke up to where Amy was lying. Liz was just to the side of her, and Hannah was a little beyond Liz. Ray and Zoe - or Caroline - were off to my left, near the tree line. Tom was close to Lousia, a little closer to the water, and Katie and Caroline - or Zoe - were behind me. I could just about make out Robyn and Hayley behind them, but focusing on anything that far away felt like I was rubbing gravel into my eyeballs.

Amy was lying on her side, her back facing toward me. I put a hand on her shoulder and tried to gently shake her awake. Nothing. I rolled her softly onto her back.

The first thing I noticed was the trickle of blood running from her nose and onto her cheek. The second thing I noticed was that she was totally naked. I blinked at her completely exposed body, shaking my head at myself and ignoring the urge to gawk. The third thing I noticed was that I was naked too. I frowned down at myself. I was certainly not naked when I passed out.

I mean, she had really nice ... Fuck, Dan! Priorities!

More than that, my body was showing signs of ... How do I say this? ... It was showing signs that it had been used ... sexually ... very recently. Like, the glistening juices on my semi-erect manhood were still slick, and the hickeys on my chest still throbbed, sort of recent. I looked around as best as I could with my still blurred vision. There was no sign of our clothes, at least as far as I could see. I’m not sure why it bothered me, but I felt the need to cover up, or at least cover Amy up.

The other pressing matters pushed back to the fore, though, and resting a hand on the top of Amy’s chest, I tried to shake her awake again.

After a few increasingly firm shakes, a soft groan escaped her lips, and her still-closed eyes frowned. “Owww, what happened?” She asked, not opening her eyes yet.

“I don’t know,” I croaked back, suddenly realizing how thirsty I was. “We all passed out. I just woke up.”

She peeked an eye open, clamping it closed again. Apparently, her eyes thought it was as bad an idea as mine had. “Dan?” She asked weakly.

“Yeah, It’s me.”

She peeked open an eye again, trying to focus them on me before frowning deeply. “You are bleeding. Your eyes are really bloodshot, too,” She tried sitting herself up, caught herself before she fell back again, then tried again much more slowly. “And why are you naked?”

I lifted my hand up to my nose, bringing it back away to frown at the thick, warm blood coating my fingertips. “You are too.” I groaned, dropping myself onto my ass next to her. “Bleeding and naked.”

She looked down at herself with a little frown, instinctively moving her hands to cover herself up. She froze for a moment, the hand over her crotch moving slightly before she looked up at me again. “Did you ... did we...?” She left the sentence hanging in the air.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I was wondering the same thing.” I ran a finger over the fresh hickeys on my chest. “I can’t see our clothes anywhere, but, honestly, this fucking headache is not helping. I woke up, saw you and the others, and thought you were the priority to try and wake.”

“Wait ... we all passed out?” She lifted herself up and looked around the clearing.

“It looks that way. Yes.” I answered with a nod. “God, I’m thirsty.”

Amy smacked her lips together, then frowned again. “If the taste in my mouth is anything to go by, I’ve ... already had some liquids.”

It took me a little longer to understand what she meant than I was comfortable with. “Oh.” I finally said. “I ... Um ... I’ve got nothing.”

There was no mistaking the suspicion in Amy’s eyes as she looked at me, but the look of pain on my face, the blood leaking from my nose, the bloodshot eyes, and my obvious confusion must have been enough for her to give me the benefit of a whole heap of doubt. “We need to check on the others,” She said with a groaning breath. “How the hell did we get to the waterfall? The last thing I remember was finding more children’s clothes in one of the cases, then hearing Louisa scream...”

I stood as steadily as I was able, one hand reflexively covering my genitals and offering the other to help her up. “I don’t know any more than you do. I have no idea how we got here,” I answered honestly, cringing at the headache which seemed to be announcing itself with my new vertical posture. Amy gave me a concerned look before pulling herself unsteadily to her feet with a sigh and bending over slightly to cover herself as best she could. One hand wrapped protectively over her bust, while the other kept hold of mine until she trusted her legs beneath her. She looked over the clearing at the others. With a deep, nervous breath, she nodded determinedly, and we got to work.

It took the better part of an hour for everyone to be woken, all of them took significantly longer to wake than Amy had, and everyone was in the same situation. All of us were naked, all of us had nose bleeds, and all of us were showing pretty obvious signs of very recent sex. The entire side of Tom’s neck was covered in Hickeys, he was running his fingers over them absently as he looked around the group. Ray had scratch marks running down most of his back. The girls all made it clear that they, too, had been subjected to some pretty vigorous sexual activity, none of them very particularly forthcoming on what that was or how they knew, but they knew.

We had migrated into the waterfall’s basin, partly to quench the thirst that we all seemed to be suffering from, partly to get some sense of refreshment for our aching, still trembling bodies, but mainly it was so everyone could hide their more private areas under the surface of the water. What had become instantly clear to all of us was that whatever had been affecting us all, whatever force had been compelling us to act the way that we had been, was gone. At least for the time being.

“I’ve never smoked,” I said, trying to explain it.” I’ve never really been a big drinker, and I’ve never touched drugs, but I imagine it was a lot like what an addict feels when he is craving a fix. It was this ... It was more than a hunger, it was like a need. It was like I was starving, or drowning, or Jonesing, and the only respite was to...”

“Feed it.” Hannah nodded from the other side of the pool. Out of the four girls who had seemed to have attached themselves to me, only Hayley had stayed reasonably close. The others kept glancing at me nervously, not openly suspicious or hostile, but there was certainly a measure of nerves behind each glance. We had all realized that we hadn’t exactly been acting normal recently, and the conversation had turned to each of us explaining how it had felt and trying to make sense of it. “It was the same for me. I came back from the hike with Liz, and your scent just ... it hit me. I couldn’t string two coherent thoughts together after that without you being a part of them. The only time I could think clearly was after we...,” she swallowed and glanced around with a slight blush. “ ... went into the forest.”

“I’m sorry,” I just shook my head. “We tried to fight it, but...”

“We?” Liz looked up from her place next to Amy.

I cast a look at Ray and sucked in a deep breath. “We thought there was something wrong,” I started, “We thought it was the food. We thought we could keep a handle on it until we worked out what it was. At that time, we thought it was just the coconuts, and before you came back from your expedition, that was all we had in terms of food and hydration, but we didn’t want to freak you out about tainted food...”

“Which would have been worse. All of us were starting to suffer from dehydration at that point,” Amy added with a nod. “It could have caused a panic.”

“That is basically what we thought, too,” I agreed.

“Then you came back, you hadn’t touched the coconuts, and it had affected you as well,” Ray chirped up, talking to Hannah. “At some point after that, it ... whatever it is ... must have got us too. We hardly gave it any thought again after that.”

“Hardly? So you did think about it?” Katie asked suspiciously.

Ray and I glanced at each other, he fidgeted uncomfortably. “Look, if we are going to deal with this, we need it all out in the open,” one of Ray’s brunette cohorts said. “This is uncomfortable for everyone, but I think we are way past that.”

I took a deep breath. “That’s fair, but I am trying to say this without sounding insulting,” I said carefully. “You have all been acting...”

“Fucking insane!” Ray blurted out suddenly. “We had to bury the dead dude at sea, we fed him to a shark for fucks sake, none of you even remembered he was in there! And even when we told you, even when you sat there watching us deal with the decomposition, you all thought we were just messing around, you had no idea what we were doing! We have a geologist, a doctor, and a teacher here. You are smart, educated women! None of you are drunk sorority chicks acting like bimbos, but...!” He waved his hands around at the women in front of us. “That is how you have been acting. Robyn has not mentioned her sister once since the first night we were here, I don’t think Lousia has mentioned her husband since even before that. Every time we bring up anything about home, you act like we are talking in a foreign language. Shit, we were trying to go through the cases to find things we may need to survive, and you all wanted to play with a damned beach ball!” He took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not your fault. I know something is happening to you, to us, but on the first day we were here, you...” he tactfully nodded to Zoe and Caroline, both of whom were sitting together and neither of whom would have been able to tell who he was nodding at. “ ... told me that you had a boyfriend back home. Yesterday I asked you what he was like, and you didn’t have a clue what I was talking about!”

“Mmmm Yes.” Tom said from the shallows next to the river outlet. “Lousia had trouble remembering her husband yesterday too.”

“Did I?” Lousia said, still sitting quite close to him. “I ... I don’t have any trouble remembering him now.”

“Mmmmm Yes, I asked you what color hair he had and what he did for work. You couldn’t remember what his hair color was, and you said you thought he worked in a factory, but you couldn’t remember what it made.”

“He ... He was blonde,” she said sadly, sinking a little further into the water. “And he was a fault tester at an electrical circuit board plant. I ... I can remember you asking me that, but ... I can’t believe I forgot him ... already.” She started to sob quietly.

“I remember thinking more clearly after we ... you know.” Hayley said from next to me.

“Yes, I did, too,” Hannah added. “That hunger you were talking about was causing a fog, but it seemed to lift after we fucked.”

Katie choked on the water she was drinking at Hannah’s choice of words. Hannah giggled, flashing me a demurred-looking glance. She seemed the least uncomfortable about everything so far.

Amy was still looking concerned. “I am worried that this ... condition, or whatever we are calling it, will affect our ability to survive. If it is impairing judgment or critical thinking...”