Welcome to Chapter 3.

A quick thanks to my amazing editing team. Your grasp of the English language allows these stories to be what they are. Thank you to the rest of you for your comments, feedback, and high ratings for each chapter as well, not to mention a huge thank you for your participation on the Discord server.

Now, on with the story.

********

Something was gnawing at the back of my mind, like an itch that couldn't be scratched or a craving I couldn't quite place. I was watching the girls frolicking about on the sand, giggling playfully as they tossed the beach ball back and forth, wrestling it from one another. Under normal circumstances, I would have been enthralled, even at this ungodly early hour. It was like a scene out of an adult film that would have had any hot-blooded male frothing at the lips, but there was something missing...

No, not something... SomeONE!

As if on cue, the bushes behind me rustled, and Hannah stepped out of them, a sling under her arm fashioned from a few tied-together shirts almost overflowing with Mangos. Her face looked up to mine, a happy smile on her face and that mischievous glint in her eye, the same one I had seen yesterday when she had watched me mate so furiously with Hayley.

I inhaled deeply, I could taste her scent. Not the crude aroma of her molten sex, well, not only that but the simple presence of her. The glistening perspiration on her skin sent a jolt through my growing tumescence, and I was somehow aware of the rise of my own pheromones in the air. She froze on the spot and sucked in a deep breath. With a morning-defying grace of movement, I was on my feet.

As soon as her eyes met mine, the look on her face changed. Gone was the happy, easy smile. In its place was a look of pure wanton desire, a lustful hunger that I immediately knew I was mirroring back at her. Her lips parted, her cheeks flushed, her nipples hardened, and their outlines pressed tantalizingly against the fabric of her white bikini.

She dropped the sling. I was halfway across the ground between us before the Mangos had finished falling from it. I grabbed her wrist and yanked her after me as I quick-marched us into the trees. A gasp escaped her lips, not one of pain from the pressure of my grip, nor was it one of fear or even apprehension at the sudden change in me; It was a gasp of pure, undiluted arousal.

She knew what was coming and wholeheartedly endorsed the plan.

I had no idea how far into the trees I pulled her before I spun her around and pulled her into me. I kissed her with a passion that I could scarcely believe, our lips crushed together as she poured as much into me as I did into her. Her thigh lifted, and her foot started running up and down the side of my leg, not only announcing her willingness but seeming to build my passions even more.

With a shove that would normally horrify the gentleman in me, she was on her back in the sand, propped up on her elbows and looking up at me with wide, excited, hungry eyes. She was panting hard, and her tongue darted out to run over her lips. Her glance down at the size and power of the throbbing bulge in my shorts only heightened her need.

I dropped down onto my knees between her parted legs, glancing down at the wetness darkening the crotch of her bikini panties, and inhaled deeply. It was there again, only much stronger. Her scent, her womanly aroma, washed over my senses like a wave over the wet sand, saturating me, filling me, completely consuming me. My resistance crumbled, and my self-control was all but gone. I dropped my head down, pulled the saturated white material to the side, and drove my tongue into her.

Her upper body had been propped up on her elbow, but as soon as my tongue made contact, she threw her head back and let loose a deep, guttural moan. One hand reaching down to press into my hair and hold me tightly into her. My tongue dragged from her sopping, scorching hole and up through her lips to flick off her clit, her panting groan as my stubble teased over her pouting, swollen lips, turning into a cried-out gasp as the hardened point of my tongue started to lap at her nub.

My thoughts were a blur. I wanted to pleasure her, not because it gave her pleasure, but because her pleasure made her wetter... It was her juices I wanted. I needed to feed on her, I needed to taste her, to devour her, to feast on her essence. If licking her clit and showing her mind-altering levels of pleasure was what it took to get more of that cream, then that was what I was going to do!

I was alternating my movement between torturing and tormenting her clit and delving my tongue deep into her. I would flick my tongue against, over, and around her pulsing nub, drawing back the hood with the flat of my tongue and sucking her clit into my lips, lashing my tongue against it. Then I would suddenly drop my head and push as much of it into her as I could, craning my head to fuck my tongue into the molten heat of her tunnel, sealing my lips around her hole and sucking out as much of her divine nectar as I could get. Every drop that touched my tongue was swallowed greedily.

The moans, mewls, gasps, and cries of rapture coming from her lips only added fuel to the fire that was burning through my mind. "Oh Fuck, Yes, Dan! Eat me, feast on me... Oh God, take what you need from me and then make me yours." Another gasped, muffled scream echoed around the forest. "Holy Shit! Nobody has ever tongue fucked me like this. Oh my fucking GOD! I am going to fucking worship you, I am going to fucking worship your cock! You are going to make me cum!! Fuck, Fuck fuckfuckfuck, I'm Cumming, I'm cumming. ImcummingImcummingIm... OH MY FUCK, I'M CUMMING!!"

Her fingers clawed at the sand as her other hand pulled at my hair hard enough to almost rip it out at the roots. Her body arched to the point that only her shoulders and her ass were touching the ground. Every muscle between was spasming and pulled tight. She started to buck hard, strangled, breathless grunts and groans fell from her lips as she let her earth-shattering climax rip through her. A deep, animal-hungry growl rumbled from my chest as I devoured every single drop of the ambrosia that flowed so freely out of her convulsing, cumming cunt.

Finally, after what must have seemed to her like an eternity of soul-searing orgasmic pleasure, she collapsed onto the ground. Her breath was ragged and heavy, and a small line of drool crept from the corner of her slack lips. She tried to swallow around the breaths but almost choked on them as her dazed-looking eyes slowly regained focus.

They snapped back to me the instant that I moved.

I pulled myself up onto my knees, dropping my hands to loosen, and then undo my shorts, pushing them down to my knees. By the time I looked back at her, Hannah was already lifting her ass off the sand and pulling the string ties on either side of her bikini, yanking the soaked garment away and lifting her legs, hooking her hands behind her knees, and spreading herself for me. Her eyes locked onto mine. "Make me yours, Dan! Fuck me like you fucked Hayley. Fuck your spunk into me and mark me! Ram your big dick up me and claim me as yours and no others!"

Something sparked at the back of my mind, pushing through the lustful haze of my urgency. Something about the way she said it. It was not said like she wanted to be only mine, but more like there was an alternative to me claiming her, a possibility of being someone else's, and she was making her choice. That little voice was silenced, however, as I plunged every single throbbing inch into her. "Yes, Fuck! Take me! Fill me! Seal the deal! Make me yours!"

Seal the deal? This girl seemed to have a much better understanding of what was going on than I did.

Of course, that thought was immediately swallowed by the deep, primal, animal growl that vibrated out of my throat as I started mercilessly and almost violently hammering my cock into her. Every rampant thrust of my hips smashed hers open a little wider. Her voluptuous tits bounced wildly on her chest as she pulled them out of her top. Every loud, wet slap echoed back to us from the trees. Every deep, throaty grunt that was thumped out of her just spurred me on to fuck her harder. "Nghn, Nghn, Nghn, Nghn!"

Her eyes were rolling, and any semblance of coherent words was gone. Only a string of fuck-fuelled vowels and grunted, panted expletives were screamed into the air. I swung a hand back and spanked her ass, letting the rippling flesh burn red in the shape of my handprint, marking her in a similar fashion to the mark on Hayley's throat. My heavy balls thudded into her rippling ass as one colossal orgasm after another crashed through her.

This was another claiming! Another instance where the time I would normally spend on trying to draw out the pleasure was utterly forgotten, replaced with a need to fuck my seed into her. To mark her with my scent, to claim her as mine. To add her to my quickly growing group of conquests. That really was what was happening here. She was in no way hesitant or resistant, but I was conquering her nonetheless.

Any thought of her enjoyment was burned from my mind by the growing bestial need. The base instinct to mate. Her eyes were swimming in their sockets, pointing up towards the top of her skull. Her mouth hung open in a perpetual series of guttural grunts, moans, and screams. Her tongue hung loosely from her lips. Her mind was completely given over to the moment. I may not have been thinking of her pleasure at all, but that didn't mean she wasn't feeling more of it than she had ever thought possible.

Her final stratospheric climax ripped into her. Her cunt clamped down onto my pistoning cock with the force of an industrial trash compactor, the grip so tight that every single movement felt like a dozen hands all simultaneously trying to stroke me to completion. I didn't even try to fight it.

I arched hard into her, I threw my head back and roared to the heavens, my balls drew up, my cock stretched her to her limits... and the world went dark.

I was still pumping into her when I came around. My climax was still shooting deep into her depths, my seed splashing through her cervix and straight into her womb... but I was me again. Obvious questions that I felt should have been asked much earlier were suddenly at the forefront of my mind. "What if I knock her up?" and more pressing, "What the fuck just happened to me?"

I mean, they weren't urgent enough to stop my continued, albeit calmer thrusts into her, but I was now wondering if the catatonic-looking mess that had formerly been Hannah was alright. As if to answer the concern I had never spoken out loud, her eyes drifted back to me with a look of awe and indescribably satisfaction. "Holyfuckingshit! I think I just saw GOD!" She giggled, rocking herself back towards the remnants of my orgasm. "I don't think anyone has ever cum that hard... like, ever!"

She pulled herself up onto her elbows again, one hand wrapping around my neck and pulling me down to mash her lips to mine. The kiss was deep and passionate, and breathless. "Fuck. Thank you. You claimed me. I am yours. I so wanted to be yours!"

********

Ray cast me a sly, knowing look as I stepped back onto the beach a few minutes later. The weak-kneed and bow-legged Hannah had been helped back as far as the log I had spent the morning on and then left there, giggling like a drunken sorority girl and cooing happily.

"Not a word," I smirked at him as he opened his mouth to speak.

He laughed, holding up his hands before glancing around the beach. More than one of the other girls were looking enviously over at Hannah before casting demure looks back at us. Ray smirked a little wider. "Well, if you can't beat 'em...." With that, he stood from the case he was rifling through, walked purposefully over to Zoe, or Caroline, or whichever of the two had been wiping her lips on entering the lake the day before, scooped her into his arms, and then carried the squealing beauty into the trees.

A few minutes later, the groans and high-pitched grunts started reverberating out of the greenery to the giggles of the rest of the women. "You were louder!" Hayley called over to the still-sitting Hannah.

"I'm not surprised," she yelled back. "He fucked the shit out of me!"

I chuckled, opened one of the cases, and started to rummage through it as the girls kept teasing each other. "I wonder who he is going to take next," Hayley shouted back, casting a smirking glance at me, doing her best to draw me into the banter. "None of the others have had any."

"Not true." Quipped Katie. The rest of the girls, with the exception of Zoe, Caroline, or whichever of the two hadn't been dragged off into the trees by Ray, turned on the grinning Katie. "I had a nice mouthful last night. A very nice mouthful." Another round of giggles echoed over the sand as the chestnut-haired young high school teacher comically licked the tips of her fingers.

"I call dibs!" Robyn chirped up, purring in my direction while still holding the beach ball.

"Whadya think, Dan?" Hayley called over to me. "Fancy a piece of Robyn?"

The twinge itched behind my eyes again, that need to claim and possess the woman in front of me. It had been mere minutes since I had returned with Hannah, yet, already, the tent was starting to grow in my shorts. "Nope," I called back, my gaze holding firmly on Robyn. "Not a piece, but I am happy to take all of her."

There was a round of "oooohs" and giggles as Robyn blushed brightly.

Something in the back of my mind that wondered how everyone was acting so normally, especially Robyn - whose sister had gone down with the plane - and the equally happy-looking Lousia - whose husband had also been killed in the crash. Both of those two women, in particular, should have been inconsolable under the circumstances, but both seemed to be acting as if nothing had happened.

Lousia, to be fair, was much quieter than the others, markedly so. But as she moved away from the rest of the group to sit by Tom, she hardly looked sad.

I had no real experience with grief, I had no measure by which to judge the girl's reactions. I could tell that their behavior was not, strictly speaking, normal, but it had only been a few days, and most of that time had been filled with the task of surviving. I shrugged it off and went back to rummaging while the girls returned to their vigorous and bouncy beach ball-tossing game.

It wasn't long later, maybe half an hour, that Ray returned to the debris pile. Taking deep, thirsty draws from his vodka bottle of water, he had left his lover on the log next to Hannah and had rejoined me, flush and breathing heavily.

"You alright there, man?" I asked with a chuckle.

"No! Fuck, I'm 52. She is literally half my age... and there are two of them! I swear to Christ, my ticker is gonna give out at this rate. Urgh, Holy shit... I think she pulled my back out!" He groaned and arched his back backward, trying to stretch it out, groaning a little louder as a few pops came from his spine.

"Gotta take care of those old bones," I smirked at him.

"You don't need to worry about my bones," he laughed back.

"That's what she said," I laughed a little louder than I meant to. "Do I need to have a chat with them, ask them to take it easy on you, old man?"

"Not unless you don't want to be violently reintroduced to Steve," he chuckled back. "Now stop messing around. We have a dead dude to get rid of."

"Yeah yeah," I nodded. "But unless we find something sharp in this lot..." I gestured to the pile of cases, "...We are going to have to make our own blade out of some broken, jagged metal. That is not going to be fun." Ray grunted his agreement and dropped down next to a case, and opened it.

I rolled my neck and looked around the beach. Today was the first day that I had really noticed the heat. It wasn't oppressively hot, it wasn't even particularly uncomfortable. It was just at that point where you felt it on the exposed parts of your skin if you stayed still for too long. And then only enough to make you wonder if it was a good time to put on some sunscreen. Sunscreen, along with some of the alcohol Amy had told us to keep for medical and disinfecting purposes, was something we had in ready supply.

Looking around the beach, I was aware that I was the most dressed out of everyone. All of the girls were wearing bikinis, Lousia's and Amy's were more modest than the others, but there was still more than enough skin on show. Elizabeth's, on the other hand, was downright scandalous. Ray had been wearing a button-down shirt before he had vanished into the woods, and it hadn't made the return journey with him. I was still wearing mine. Tom hadn't worn a shirt since the day before and was now chatting to Louisa while banging smaller rocks against a partially buried boulder.

Tossing one case of useless items aside and dragging out another one, I cast another look back up the beach towards the youngest member of our group. Autism is a curious condition, and no two people with it are exactly the same. Tom, for example, seemed utterly oblivious to the sexual energy running through the group. That is not to say that he was incapable of sexuality at all, quite the opposite if the subtle glances he was casting at Lousia were anything to go by. It was more that he was only really able to comprehend it on a one-on-one basis. The energy, the feelings, and the atmosphere were not the issue; the fact that it was displayed by a group, and not by any one individual, was. The same seemed to go for communication. He could talk to pretty much anyone, provided it was a conversation he felt he could be a part of. But when he needed to address more than one person, as he had with his explanation of the chances of our rescue, he didn't actually speak to us. He had focused his eyes on his drawing on the sand and spoken to that. We had all just happened to be listening. If one person asked a question, he could answer it as well as anybody else, if not better, but then he was talking to that person, still not to the group. It was very clearly a coping mechanism and a very effective one at that. If he was oblivious to the sexual energy of the group, I would imagine that the same would apply to our anger, frustration, happiness, or pretty much any other emotion. Tom didn't do crowds. I could hardly blame him on that front.

At that moment, he seemed to be in something of a casual, perhaps even flirty, conversation with Lousia and seemed perfectly happy in doing so. His continued clanging of the rocks, a rhythmic knocking sound, echoed around the beach. "What is Tom doing?" I asked Ray.

"I'm not sure," Ray said after a few moments, straightening himself and looking up at the young man. "He was peeling a tree earlier."

"He was what?"

"Hey, I'm not questioning it, man." Ray chuckled as he turned to face me. "I've got a nephew who is autistic, Kid is a fucking genius! If Tom thinks breaking rocks or peeling trees is a good idea, then it's a good idea. I would bet body parts that he is going to stroll over later, and will have done something with them that none of us had even thought of, and we are all going to feel like idiots for not thinking of it first."

"You mean like knowing how to open coconuts?"

"Exactly.... Fuckin' coconuts!"

"Fuckin coconuts!" I concurred with a chuckle and dragged open the zipper on the case in front of me.

I lifted the lid of the case and started pulling things out, it was mainly filled with children's clothes. The clothing was relatively useless, but the cloth they were made out of could be torn apart for other, more useful things later. A memory of little Johnny briefly flashed through my head again, and I cast a quick glance over to the area we had all wordlessly agreed was our sleeping spot. Ellie the Elephant was still sitting on the rock where I had left her. I could still remember every feature of his face as if it had been etched into my brain. His mother was a little vaguer, though. I could remember her smile, but everything else about her seemed to have been lost in the proceeding events. The first inklings that I was nowhere near as devastated by their loss as I had been on our first night started to pull a frown onto my brow.

"Oh, Jackpot!" Ray suddenly announced, pulling my attention back to the task at hand. He grinned happily as he pulled a box of condoms out of one of the cases. "These are going to be vital!"

"How many are in there?"

He opened the box and peered inside. "Oh... four."

"Excellent. At this rate, we are safe until lunchtime." I snorted.

"Fuck, little Rays running around the island, playing tag with all the little Dans." He shuddered visibly.

I cast a glance over to the crowd of women. "Would that be such a..." I stopped myself mid-sentence.

Would that be such a bad thing? What the fuck!... Ray either didn't hear me or had chosen to ignore such a ridiculous idea. I cleared my throat and made another attempt at saying something sensible. "Yeah, we should probably talk to them about that."

"Oh hey, I found a lighter!" Ray suddenly announced. "Condom guy is on a roll! What else does he have in here?" He started pulling armloads of clothes out of the case, rummaging around for more. "Holy shit! Hey Amy!" He called over to the group of women. "Would this be of any use to you?" He had pulled out a green first aid box and was waving it in the air.

"Oh my god! YES!" The Doc replied, instantly forgetting the game she was playing with the others and running over. She dropped onto the sand and took the kit excitedly, opening it up and checking the contents. "Phew." she breathed happily after a few minutes. "Okay, so this isn't going to do much if someone gets seriously hurt, but smaller things? I think we are covered."

"Does that mean we get to drink the alcohol?" Ray grinned back.

"Not unless you want this jammed into a very intimate area." Amy chuckled back, pulling out a pair of medical, needle-pointed scissors and waving them menacingly at him.

Ray and I both blinked, then groaned loudly.

"What?" Amy asked in confusion.

Ray slowly reached over and took the scissors out of her hand. "We needed something sharp to deal with dead dude."

"Who?" Amy frowned, the confused look staying firmly in place.

"Err... the guy in the life raft?" He said, a frown of his own pulling at his brow.

Amy turned around and looked over her shoulder at the raft. It hadn't moved from its spot further up the beach since we had pulled it ashore. "Oohhhhh. I'd forgotten about him." Amy shook her head and chuckled. "Well, okay, I'm going to put this somewhere safe," with that, she got up and skipped almost giddily toward the trees.

Ray and I just sat there for a few moments, the scissors still in Ray's hand. "That was weird, right?" he asked.

"The Doctor who was heartbroken about not being able to save a man's life, forgetting his body was still in the life raft?" I replied. "Yeah, just a little."

"Hmmm. We may have a bigger problem than we thought." He nodded.

"Yeah. Fuckin coconuts!"

"Fuckin coconuts." He agreed. "Okay, I need you to rip some of those useless clothes into face masks. Make sure they cover our noses and mouths. I need to find the blue case where Tom put all the perfumes."

********

A little while later, maybe an hour or so, we were ready. The still shirtless Ray had the remains of a little girl's bright pink t-shirt strapped over his face. A 'My Little Pony' displayed prominently on the front. I could try to tell you that this was a complete accident and a byproduct of the system I used to make it... But that would be a lie. My face mask was green. The women were all sitting around watching us, all of them giggling at how we looked. I'm pretty sure that Ray and I would have cast more than a few concerned looks at each other at their simple incomprehension of the task we were undertaking, but both of us were barely able to see through the tears in our eyes. The amount of cologne and perfume Ray had soaked into the facecloths was overpowering.

Whatever was happening to them wasn't turning them into mindless bimbos. Amy had proven that with her immediate professionalism over the first aid kit. It was more like they were forgetting about things a little too easily, and that only seemed to apply to things that would sour their mood. Amy and most of the others had only remembered the body of the man in the raft when they had been reminded of it and forced to confront it. Robyn and Louisa hadn't remembered him at all. It was not lost on either Ray or me that these were the two women who should be grieving the most.

The issue I had is that I never really knew any of them before our arrival on the Island, meaning I had no idea how much of the way they were acting was the real them and how much was an effect of whatever was happening to them. I would need to make a conscious effort to find out as much about them as I could. More than just getting to know them, but seeing if I could get some sort of history or backstory by which to measure their current demeanor.

They were more than a little amused by our appearance, but the reason for its necessity - the decomposition of the body and so on - seemed to be lost on all of them except Amy. They just shrugged it off as if it were nothing.

"Alright," Ray coughed. "We go in, we cut around the sides, we fold the bottom of the raft over the body, and then lift the rest of it away."

"Got it." I nodded.

He cast a look my way. Or at least I think he did, it was hard to tell through the blurred vision of my tearing eyes. Breathing through the fumes of the cologne was hard enough; seeing through it was almost impossible. "Take a deep breath." He said somberly. "This is going to suck!"

With a deep and held breath, he stepped forward, opened the flap, and started to step inside. Only a few seconds later, even before I could reach the flap, he came stumbling back out again. Coughing, spluttering, gagging, and wrenching. "Nope. Fuck that! The crabs have found him! Holy shit, that is not something I am going to forget any time soon." He shuddered almost violently, stooping down to rest his hands on his knees. I looked towards the flap again; we all know what they say about curiosity and cats. "Don't do it, man. Just... Don't. Trust me on this. That shit is..." He didn't get to finish his sentence as he deposited his last few meals onto the sand.

The girls had all stopped giggling and were now looking on with concern.

Zoe and Caroline had jumped to their feet and were running toward Ray; Amy wasn't far behind them. Ray waved them back, gesturing to keep away as he managed to straighten himself up. The opening of the flap had released some of the smell from inside, I could taste it even through the overpowering amounts of perfume. I could feel my stomach starting to turn. The girls, still a dozen or more feet away, all stopped, lifting their hands to cover their mouths and deciding that Ray may be onto something when telling them to keep their distance.

"Alright, new plan," Ray finally said after managing to compose himself. He stood back up straight and looked at the raft.

"I'm listening," I said after a suitable amount of silent minutes.

"Oh, I don't have one. I was just saying we need a new one."

"Ah."

We stared at the raft for a little while longer.

"Okay, how about this..." I started slowly, already wondering how much of this was a good idea with Steve still around. "...We lift up the sides and cut about half of the bottom away from beneath."

"Go on," Ray said after a pause.

"Then we push the whole raft into the water, as deep as we are able without pissing off our friendly neighborhood shark, and let the raft fill with water. The weight of the water should push the hole open, and Dead Dude should just... kinda float or sink out of it."

"Will that work? Won't he just sort of float around inside there?"

"It shouldn't matter," I said after a little thought. "If we lift the raft as we are pulling it back, it would lift the edges over him. Once part of him is out, we can just pull the raft over the rest of him. Plus, dragging it into the water with a hole in the bottom should scoop a fair bit of sand into it. That would weigh down the bottom and help him slide out."

"What about Steve?" Ray asked. Both of us looked out at the Ocean, the dark and dangerous-looking fin was nowhere to be seen. That didn't necessarily mean he was gone, he could have just been fully submerged in deeper water, and we had all seen how fast he could move if he thought there was a meal nearby... which he absolutely would do as soon as the bodily fluids around the dead dude leaked into the water.

"Yes, Steve would be a problem." I nodded. "Unless..." I stepped closer to the raft, kneeling down and studying the thin rope that was attached to its circumference. It had been what we had gripped onto to pull the raft when we had been swimming towards the Island. "Hand me the scissors."

A little while later, we were ready. The rope had been cut and attached to one of the fastening rings beneath the entrance flap, and the bottom section of the raft floor had been cut away on the opposite half of the circular-shaped craft. With a shove, we pushed it into the water and followed it in. The rope would let us stay out of the deeper, more dangerous Steve-infested water, but it wasn't long enough to let us stay on the beach. We were hoping that the dead body in the raft would keep him busy if he turned up.

We stopped before the water reached our knees, Ray on one side of the rope, me on the other, and we allowed the waves to wash the raft, and its cargo, further and further away from us. Finally, the rope was stretched out to its full length, and we held. "Now what?" Ray asked.

"Not a clue. This is as far ahead as I..."

The entire raft seemed to jump a few feet out of the water, and an enormous splash exploded from beneath it. The patch of crystal clear water around the craft slowly started to tinge with red. I sighed deeply. "Never mind, Steve is here."

"Hi, Steve."

"Did you want to say a few words or anything?"

Ray smirked at me.

"Don't do it, man."

Ray grinned a little wider before he started to sing. "We are sailing....."

********

A little while later, all of us - with the exception of Tom and Lousia - were sitting on the log at the top of the beach. The reality of the scene in front of them at the raft had snapped the girls out of their giggly distraction, and all of them were somberly discussing the next steps.

"We need some shelter," Liz stated simply. "We have food, we have water, but eventually the weather is going to turn, and if we don't have any...."

"We are at risk of succumbing to exposure," Amy finished for her.

"The raft is going to need a few days, minimum, to be aired out before it can be used for anything," Ray added.

"And we are going to need tools to actually build something, something sturdy enough to be useful, anyway. The raft will do in a pinch, but a strong gust of wind, and it's gonna be useless." I chipped in. "We need to think of it as a glorified sunshade. Not as a shelter. Real shelter is going to need to be built from scratch... That is going to take tools... and time."

"And there is nothing useful in the cases?" Hayley asked, leaning into the side of me.

"Not yet," My arm wrapped comfortably around her waist, and my fingers were tenderly and familiarly stroking over the skin of her hip. "But I don't think we have checked more than a third of the cases. We may still get lucky."

There were a series of nods. "Okay, I'm going to say it," Robyn spoke up. "What if we aren't lucky?"

"We don't have to worry about that," Lousia said, beaming as she and Tom approached the rest of the group. Tom stepped forward and, while maintaining perfect eye contact, handed something to me.

It took me a few moments to realize what I was looking at. "Holy fucking Shit, Tom! You made this?" Tom nodded as I held it up for the rest of the group to see. In my hand was a fairly thick but almost perfectly straight branch. The branch didn't look like it came from any of the trees close to the beach, so he had clearly gone hunting for it while the rest of us had been busy. But what was truly remarkable about the stick, was that it had what looked like a stone age style ax-head attached to one end of the stick. The stone had been smashed and shaped in a way that made one side of it into a perfect ax shape, while the other had been tapered off into almost a point, which had been worked through the branch. The whole thing had been tied off by what looked like the fibrous skins on the palm trees.

Tom, from banging stones together for god knew how many hours, and even more hours before that, literally peeling trees, had fashioned a crude but apparently effective ax.

"Called it." Ray laughed.

I looked down, my jaw opened in disbelief, before I managed to pull my eyes back up to Tom. "You... Jesus, I don't know what to say... You may have just saved everyone's life... Thank you."

Tom beamed proudly, his eye contact faltering at the praise. "Mmmmm, you are welcome."

"Well, okay. Thanks to Tom here, I get to be a lumberjack for the rest of the day. Who wants to help?" Hayley, Hannah, Katie, and Robyn all threw their hands into the air as I ran my thumb over the surprisingly sharp edge of the blade. It wasn't sharp enough to draw blood, but it was more than enough to fell trees.

"That looks about fair." Amy nodded with a smile. "The rest of us can go through as many cases as we can to see what else is there."

"Sounds like a plan to me," Ray said, clapping Tom on the arm.

With a few more words of goodbyes and good luck, we parted into our work groups and went our separate ways. Hayley hooked her arm onto one side of me, Robyn on the other.

"You do realize something," Robyn purred into my ear as we headed into the trees and towards the waterfall. "You're not gonna be allowed to leave this forest until you have fucked my brains out too."

I just laughed. Hayley, who had heard the whole thing, giggled too. "I wouldn't dream of it."

********

Thank you all for reading Chapter 3 of the Island.

After reading the comments, I have noticed that a lot of you seem to be having the same hang-ups on the same issues. Especially things like the waste of alcohol and buttons, etc. These are not oversights; these are put in intentionally and will become important later in the story when the source of the control over them... or the source of their loss of control... is revealed. A lot of thought is put into foreshadowing and dropping subtle hints about the nature of the control, but it is done over time. This is written to a slow-burn story, the major themes will not be unveiled for some time yet, and a lot of that includes the realization - by the main character and others - that they have made mistakes despite their obviousness. The whole "what the hell was I thinking?" and "Why the hell did I do that?" are going to be ongoing questions until they are answered. I will always appreciate constructive criticism, but I can assure you that this is a point that has already been considered.

The same applies to the understandable desire for the women in the story to be more fleshed out. I have no desire to write a story about bimbos or mindless sex slaves. Each character, male and female, is going to be as complete and thoroughly considered as I am able to make them. I promise you that it is coming.

The next chapter will be released on Monday, and the newest NewU chapter will be submitted on Thursday.

I will see you all soon, stay awesome.

Nova