Race with Danger (Run for Your Life Book 1) (7 page)

“It reminds me of tree frogs back home in Washington State,” I tell him.

“We’ve got those, too,” he says.

Having other people stand here with me spoils my solitary ritual of immersing myself in the night, so I raise my arms and murmur, “Well, goodnight, world.”

Then I head back to the tent. My partner and guard silently follow, like shadows.

As we slip into our beds, Sebastian says, “First place,” and then adds in a hokey Old West voice, “We done good, pardner.”

“It’s only the first day,” I remind him. For a second, I think about how close we came to drowning. But we didn’t. I pull the sheet over my shoulder and roll over to sleep. “Yeah, we done good.”

We’ve only been stretched out on our cots for maybe five minutes when we are awakened by bells and whistles and camera flashes outside. The reception committee has gotten its act together now. The third-place team—Marco Senai and Suzana Mistri—arrives ninety-eight minutes after we did.

I hear the creak of a folding chair as one of the Secret Service robots behind our tent shifts his weight. His companion stands up and stretches—I can tell because his shoulder joints pop and I hear the whisper of his windbreaker sliding over his starched shirt. I’ve seen at least six of these suits now. I wonder if Sebastian knows all of them by name.

These guys make me antsy. Surely they realize that there’s no better way to advertise a target than to surround it with guards? Might as well have a neon arrow that points to us with flashing letters:
Here they are
.

The next team—Madelyn Hatt and Jason Jones—comes in fifteen minutes later to more noisy fanfare. It’s going to be impossible to get any real sleep here.

In the dark tent, I glance at Sebastian lying on the cot across from me. I can’t really see his face, but I see the pale gleam of his eyes in the dark, so I know they’re open. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but in my mind, all these teams are too close to ensure a win for us. Three checkpoints and more than 150 miles to go before the finish line. Anything could happen.

What was that threat the guards hinted at earlier? Does Sebastian know? Does he care? Do I want to know?

I pull the necklace from beneath my pillow and slip the braided cord over my head. I can’t see it well in the dark, but I finger the outline of Africa, trace the shapes of the animals. Who is P.A. Patterson?

Is it possible that my parents are watching me from a distance as I grow up? But that makes no sense. I know all that blood was real. And my brother—what about Aaron?

I decide I have too much to worry about already. We won’t know where the next checkpoint is until we get our download two hours before we have to leave. Which means we now have less than seven hours to sleep.

I finally give up and swallow a pill from the little stash I always carry in my pack when I do multi-day races. These drugs are allowed, but it’s a scary thing for me to take them, especially in a strange place. However, sometimes you’ve just got to have faith that you will wake up in the morning.

I dream of seeing my dead parents on the floor but then, instead of running this time, I’m forced to swim through a river of blood to find Bailey, Aaron, and Sebastian.

I wake up when I feel fingers crawling across my back.

I yelp and roll over. The elephant hair cord saws into my neck as I whip my elbow around to give my attacker a blow to the head.

Sebastian jerks away, slapping his hand over his right eye.

“Sorry,” he grunts, sliding back to the edge of my cot. He’s wearing only a pair of boxers.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I snarl, pushing myself to a sitting position. That’s all I need right now, to have a partner I can’t trust to keep his hands to himself while I’m sleeping.

“I thought I saw lights.” He rubs his brow. “Something was glowing on your back.”

“Oh.” Now
I’m
mortified. “The fireflies.”

I turn my back to him and jerk on the tail of my sleep shirt, pulling it down so he can see the tattoos that cover my right shoulder blade. “They have this special ink that lights up when I have strong emotions. I was having a bad dream.”

“Cool,” he says. “Not the dream, but the tats.” He rubs the tip of his index finger over my shoulder. His touch gives me goosebumps. “Why fireflies?”

I twist around again to give him a shrug. “For my mom and dad. I like to think there are fireflies in heaven.”

“But why the third one?”

I can’t tell my race partner about my brother. “That’s me.”

“Why doesn’t that one light up?”

“Because I’m still here.” I certainly can’t tell him about how I don’t know whether Aaron is still on earth or not.

“I get it,” he says, sitting back. Then he stands up off my bed and turns his back to dress.

I hear the steady drum of rain on the outside of our tent, so today we will run in the wet. It’s so humid here anyway that it probably won’t make a lot of difference. While I dress in my normal running gear, I worry about my dream. That I would have nightmares about my parents and my brother is understandable, especially after seeing that pendant. It’s a post-traumatic stress thing.

But why did my dreams include Sebastian and Bailey? Why is my subconscious already trying to count the living among the lost?

My neck is ringed by a raw red stripe where the cord chafed it when I rose up to whack Sebastian. The mark stings a little. I pull the necklace off over my head. No way will I wear that pendant during the race. Whatever it means, I don’t need an audience all over the world to see it. I put it in my personal lockbox to be transported to our next stop.

We confer in the main tent over breakfast, Sebastian and I and two of our keepers, who are dressed in identical black rain suits, which must be regulation secret squirrel storm wear. The weather is already hot, and wearing one of those has got to be like walking around inside your own personal sauna. Outside the tent flap, the downpour blurs our jungle surroundings.

We focus on the map stretched across our breakfast table. The second checkpoint on the island is on the far side of what appears to be a swamp or a marsh. But in my experience, wetlands marked on maps aren’t necessarily deep, or even always present. Sebastian and I agree that if the area’s not as soggy as it looks, there might be animal trails through it that we can follow, or if it is a swamp, there will be trails around the worst parts. So we plot a course directly to the water’s edge and then around it to a military road on the other side. There’s not a lot of choice in the terrain today; most of the racers will probably take the same route, so we don’t have any time to lose.

I vote to carry our climbing rope and harnesses. You never know what you might encounter on this island. Sebastian agrees to the rope but only one harness, which actually makes more sense; every ounce counts. As we choke down a tasteless mix of carbs and protein and vitamin glop in the wee hours before dawn, we watch the vids taken in camp last night. The male member of Team Three—Chris Ferris—failed his drug test. The vid shows him protesting, saying he didn’t take any illegal substances, and I can’t help wondering if The Mad Hatter has struck again, because Madelyn Hatt and Jason Jones came in only a few minutes before Team Three arrived. But maybe Chris is simply lying. After all, whoever says, “Whoops, you caught me?”

The limping gal on Team Six has a pulled hamstring that prevents her from continuing, which I try to feel sorry about. I do genuinely feel sorry for her partner, because his teammate’s injury means he’s automatically out of the race, too.

Now we’re down to eight teams, and some of those are so far behind us that unless something major happens to the front runners, they’re not real threats. Catie and Ricco are in second place. Senai and Mistri, third. Fourth belongs to Hatt and Jones. Both Maddie’s parents and Catie’s father are—as usual—in camp with them. On the vid, Mr. Hatt’s face is tense and his hands are clutched into fists as his daughter gallops into camp, but then he glances at the camera, smiles, and throws his arms around Maddie. It must be nice to have parents that worry so much.

Along with a gray-bearded suit, the female suit is again in our entourage this morning—the blond with her hair twisted up tight at the back of her head. Obviously there’s a whole team of professional sheepdogs tracking Sebastian on this island.

During breakfast, the blond lays her smart phone down beside Sebastian’s plate.

He pushes it out of the way without looking at the screen.

“What?” I stretch my arm across the table to grab the phone.

Blondie pulls the phone out of my reach and steps back into her position along the wall. The disrespect is really annoying.

Then, drug tests taken, foot blisters checked and bandaged, clean dry sponsor-labeled clothing layered appropriately, we start off before the first rays of light, at a whispered signal given by Mrs. Wrinkle as she stares blearily at an antique stopwatch. She must have stayed up all night.

Our start seems sort of anticlimactic. No cameras, no fanfare. Only the Secret Service suits (and presumably, their drone overhead) watch us jog into the trees.

The sun is barely up when we reach the edge of the wetland. Water gleams between the reeds as far as we can see, but there is also what looks like an old dike extending out into the swamp. Perhaps it was a road at one time, but it has definitely been abandoned now. The dirt pathway dips and rises and is dotted with young trees that have sprouted in the dirt. The dike or road or whatever it was has been gnawed by water on both sides down to a narrow strip. But if we can get through that way, it would cut off at least a mile from the route around the swamp.

“It’s my turn to decide the course,” Sebastian reminds me. “I say, we risk it.”

“Not afraid of those dire warnings about water in the briefing?”

He shakes his head. “I faced anacondas in the Amazon.”

I now know he took second place in his race there last year; no mean feat. I was lucky to get third. The men’s race comes before the women’s in the Jungle Marathon, so our paths never crossed.

The main problem with following this uncharted route is that we have no idea what we might run into. Our wrist units show only the route we marked for the day and how far we are from that line; there are no other distinguishing features to help us.

As we set out on the rough path, I try not to think about how this elevated strip would be the logical spot for snakes to sun themselves and the most likely travel route for a tiger. There is a trail of sorts along the top, but it’s often so narrow we have to squeeze between saplings to continue. The rain continues to sheet down, as warm as bath water, but not nearly as comfortable. Our clothes plaster themselves to our skin. Rivulets run down our legs into our running shoes, and bits of vegetation glue themselves to our faces and appendages as we push through the wet growth. After about a half hour of this soggy exploration, I nearly fall on top of a striped snake. It throws its body into coils in the middle of the trail and threatens us with a loud hiss. I have no idea if it’s venomous, but it looks pissed. I jump back, almost knocking Sebastian off the dike. Thankfully, the snake quickly decides that we’re not worth risking its fangs on, and it slithers off down the bank and vanishes into the swamp.

This alerts me to the possibility of serpents in the water, so I scan both sides of the dike as best I can while moving. And then I see another snake. This one is just emerging from the water’s edge, and judging by the size of its spade-shaped head, I don’t want to see the rest of its giant python body. I point at it so Sebastian will take note as we race past. A few yards further on, I hear something big crash through the brush off to the side. This gives me heart palpitations, but when the crashing is followed by splashing noises, I know that the tiger-buffalo-python is moving away from us.

Then the causeway or dike or whatever it used to be ends.

“Damn it!” Sebastian curses as he slicks his hair back out of his eyes. His muddy hands leave brown-red stripes on the sides of his face. He looks worried.

The rain isn’t letting up. Huge drops dance across the surface of the murky water between us and the shore.

“It doesn’t look so far,” I say. “Maybe a hundred yards? You can swim, right, Callendro?”

He looks at me and snorts with derision. “I think I proved that yesterday.”

Then we stare at the water again, and I know we’re both wondering two things. One, how many snakes might be hidden in that brown soup. Two, how deep is it? With these conditions, there’s no way to tell.

“At least there’s no current,” my partner says.

I bend over to untie my running shoes.

After stashing shoes and socks in my pack, I slide down the muddy bank into the muck. At first, there’s only a few inches of water, but then, as we lurch toward the shore, the swamp deepens to over a foot. It’s slow going because we have to pull our feet out of the slimy bog with each step. It might have been faster after all to run around this area. A leech attaches its ugly black slimy self to the back of my right knee. Two of them glom onto Sebastian’s calves as he wades through the water ahead of me. Ick.

What looks at first like a vine zig-zags through the water ahead of us. I gulp, but fortunately the snake is small and in a hurry. A multi-legged something crawls up the back of my neck. I’m afraid to brush it off because I can’t see if it has fangs or a stinger.

Tropical paradise, my ass. Give me the bug- and venomous-snake-free Pacific Northwest any day.

The water deepens to two feet. Then, it’s nearly up to our waists and my feet still sink into muck with every step, but we are nearing the shore. Sebastian’s feet must find firmer ground, because suddenly he surges ahead, moving quickly up the bank.

I try to crabwalk in the direction he took, and that’s when I see the nostrils.

The eyes.

The ridges of its back and the long curve of its tail.

There are
crocodiles
?

I was so busy keeping a watch for pythons that I forgot to look for anything else.

I scream and flounder toward shore, pushing my hands and feet through the watery muck. My toes and fingers can’t get purchase fast enough to thrust me to safety. The croc is only a few yards behind me. At any second I’m going to feel those steel trap jaws snap shut on my leg or torso. I’ve always thought of myself as a calm sort of person, but right now I can’t stop screaming.

My left foot lands on packed sand, and as I struggle to drag my right out of the mud, a huge splash of brown water smacks me in the face, blinding me. Sebastian is suddenly beside me, yanking on my arm. Then he’s behind me, shoving, one hand against my back and another on my butt, propelling me toward the shore. As my trapped foot comes free, I run right out of his hands. But when I turn, I see he has fallen onto his hands and knees, and the croc is closing in. Sebastian claws his way to his feet and lunges ahead, throwing his body toward the shore. I meet him halfway, wrapping my arms around him to pull him up. We fall up the bank, Sebastian on top of me, both of us scrabbling like crazed crabs in the mud. Over Sebastian’s shoulder, I see the croc lunge after us like a reptilian missile, its razor-toothed jaws wide open.