Ambushed

by Jill Williamson

“Ha ha.” So not funny to even think about that.

  “Okay,” Gabe said. “So let’s put something under his neck, then figure out how to use this stuff to make a stretcher.”

  “Many people mistake ankle fractures for sprains,” Wally said, “but they’re quite different injuries.”

  Gabe pulled a T-shirt out of his pack and started rolling it. “We don’t have to make a diagnosis. And if he’s on a stretcher, I’m not worried about his ankle.” Gabe crouched beside me and tucked the T-shirt under my neck.

  “But we can’t move him if his neck might be broken,” Wally said. “We’d be wiser to ask the helicopter to land and have their men come up here with a stretcher.”

  “That’s not the assignment,” I said. “Stop arguing and listen to Gabe.”

  “We can use my notebook to stabilize his head and shoulders when we pick him up,” Gabe said.

  Wally sighed. “Fine.”

  So I stayed on the ground while Gabe and Wally argued over how to attach the tent flysheet to the walking sticks. First they tied one side’s ties to the other, but when they stuck the sticks through, it was way too wide, even for me. My rear end would have been dragging on the ground. Next, they folded it in half but couldn’t figure out how to attach it to the sticks.

  “What if you just wrapped the climbing rope around it as much as you could, then draped the flysheet over it to make a cot?” I suggested.

  So they tried it. But the rope wasn’t long enough and only went around the sticks four times, hardly enough to support me.

  “Forget the flysheet,” Gabe said. Let’s just use our jackets.”

  “How?” Wally asked.

  Gabe took his off, zipped it up, and tucked in the sleeves. Then he threaded the poles in the sleeve holes and back out the waist.

  “Nice, Gabe,” I said.

  Wally removed his coat slowly. “I didn’t put on sunscreen this morning.”

  Gabe snatched Wally’s coat from him and got it threaded up the end of the sticks. “We really need three coats if we’re going to support his legs too.”

  “I got a spare T-shirt in my bag,” I said.

  Gabe found my shirt and put it on the end of the sticks. He laid the stretcher beside me on the ground and pulled the sticks as far apart as they’d go. “Okay, Wally, you get his feet. On the count of three we lift him. Not very high. Just straight to the stretcher.”

  I couldn’t believe they actually got me on the thing. Gabe put his notebook under my head. It felt too small to support anything. They started carrying me up the incline, but I slid backwards and had to grab the covered walking sticks to keep from sliding right off the end.

  “Guys, hey!”

  “Wally, catch up to me,” Gabe said. “We’ll go sideways up the hill.”

  Once Wally caught up, they sidestepped their way to the top. The sky was bright and covered in fluffy clouds. It was kind of fun to let them cart me around.

  By the time they got to the main trail and started taking the switchbacks down the mountain, I could see Lukas, Isabel, and Arianna coming down a different switchback. They had Nick on their tent’s flysheet. It looked like they’d rolled the walking sticks up from the edges of the tent until they had a nice stretcher. Smart. Probably Arianna’s idea.

  We barely beat them to the orange flag, but Mr. S gave them more points for first aid. Arianna had bandaged Nick’s leg and put a neck brace on him.

  “Seriously? Who packs a neck brace?” I said. “That’s just nuts.”

  “It’s never nuts to be prepared,” Arianna said.

  “I, for one, am thankful for my teammate’s foresight,” Nick said. “The way I see it, I recovered fully, but Garmond is paralyzed for life.”

  See? I knew Nick’s kindness wouldn’t last long.

  ● ● ●

  Grace didn’t show at church on Sunday either, and Arianna said she was supposed to have been back by now.

  She didn’t answer any of my texts or Facebook messages.

  It was kind of freaking me out.

  So I walked over to Ghetoside—a Pilot Point nickname for the Meadowside Apartments where Grace lived. Her place was on the ground floor and faced the street. The driveway in front was empty. The lights were off. I even knocked on the door, but no one was home.

  I let it go for a few days, but when school started and Jaz said Grace hadn’t been in class, I started going by her place more often.

  And one night, the lights were on, and an old Honda Civic was parked in the driveway. I went and knocked on the door. I could hear the TV all the way out here, but I guessed the walls weren’t very thick. I should probably question the neighbors. See if they’d heard anything from the place. I could ask Kip’s dad if there had been any calls to the cops for this address.

  The front door jerked open. A man stood there holding a can of Budweiser. He was wearing worn jeans and a T-shirt with Kurt Busch’s race car on it. He had buzz-cut blond hair and the reddish skin that usually came with heavy drinking—something Mr. S had taught us. He also reeked like a kegger.

  “Mr. Thomas?” I asked.

  “Who wants to know?”

  Oh, yeah. He was so cool. “I’m Spencer Garmond. One of Grace’s friends. We both went to Okinawa last summer.”

  “She’s not here. She’s in Miami with her mom.”

  “But I thought that was just for Christmas.”

  “They didn’t come back. I think they’re staying there.”

  His indifference ticked me off. “Maybe it’s because you beat them up,” I said. “Or maybe Grace isn’t in Miami at all because you hurt her too bad this time.”

  “Listen here, you cocky little . . .” And I left out the rest of what he called me since this is an official report and all. But he basically told me to get off his property or he’d call the cops.

  So I left.

  And I really hoped I hadn’t made things worse for Grace.

  ● ● ●

  January breezed by. The same schools were still talking to coach about me, except Berkley had offered early, which made no sense to me until Coach said he’d told them I wanted to study computers and work for the CIA.

  So, Grandma and I went north to visit Berkley and Stanford—two schools I’d never get into on academics alone. We even got to watch them play each other at Stanford, which won by ten. Stanford played better than they had when I watched them against the Arizona Wildcats. I definitely liked them better than Berkley, which was kind of a tree hugging school. But UC Berkley had a campus attaché for the CIA. If the NBA and the Mission League didn’t pan out, maybe I could still be a spy—with a gun, even.

  I ranked my choices based on who’d shown interest: Arizona State, Arizona Wildcats, Stanford, Berkley. And then there was Gonzaga. A great team. Good coaching staff from what I could tell. Far away, though. Not a power school or a power conference.

  At this point, I wasn’t going to choose early. I’d wait until the fall and see if anyone would bring me in for an official visit. Hopefully by then UCLA would have a chance to see more of me.

  The League continued to have Saturday OST days. We drove up to Big Bear and did a day of snow survival, went rock climbing at Miniholland in the Santa Monica Mountains, and started one-Saturday-a-month scuba diving classes down in Venice where this tattooed chick, Blaire, had mercy on me and taught me to tread water and do that crawl-stroke breathing thing—my crawl stroke still sucked.

  Still no Grace, but she did text back to say she was staying in Miami a while longer. I asked her to text me what she’d written on my back in Okinawa as a code phrase, just to make sure it wasn’t her dad trying to get rid of me. But she answered correctly.

  And then it was February. Our team was 21-2. Playoffs were coming, and we were in great shape to win the section finals and make state.

  Everything was on track. I just had to keep on swimming.

  ● ● ●

  The first Saturday in February found the League up in Topanga Canyon Park for a d
ay of concealment training, which was basically playing hide and seek. Alpha team would go first, and Diakonos would be timed on how fast they could find us. After lunch, we’d switch. I remembered from our last trip up here that there was no cell service, so I’d worn my grandpa’s wristwatch. I hated not knowing the time.

  We stood in the parking lot by the open back door of Mr. S’s minivan where he had bins of camo clothing, nets with leaves, and military face paints.

  “The purpose of camouflage is to hide yourself and your equipment from the enemy,” he said.

  “Camouflage predates humanity, Mr. Stopplecamp,” Wally said. “It started when our Creator designed animals to naturally adapt and blend in with their environment.”

  “Thank you for that, Wally,” Mr. S said. “For us humans, however, two elements help concealment: color and pattern. Colors match your surroundings and patterns conceal the contours of your hidden shape. When we see things, our perception recognizes certain objects. If we’re looking for a spruce tree, we look for a long, brown trunk and dark green branches. But if that tree was painted like camouflage it would be much harder to see.”

  I knew this already. We’d done a bunch of camouflage experiments last fall, including creating hidden patterns and shapes out of Legos and painting rubber balls with camo paint.

  Today we were going to paint each other.

  And still no Grace. Major frown. I was glad that she was safe and sound in Miami, but I kind of missed her snark. And the smell of coconuts.

  To make things fair, since the teams were uneven, Alpha team also got to hide a duffle bag, which we agreed was about the size of Grace. That way each team had to make four finds.

  The morning was overcast and foggy, which gave us an advantage in hiding first since the fog would burn off by lunch time. But Diakonos could learn from our mistakes, which might help them hide better when their turn came.

  Kerri waited at the van with Diakonos, and Mr. S helped Gabe, Wally, and me carry the bags of gear up to the public restrooms, which reeked, by the way.

  “You guys have a half hour to get yourselves ready and hide,” Mr. S said. “Don’t waste it.”

  We pulled out two tan and brown camo outfits, and two green and brown ones.

  I’ll tell you what—a half hour is not long enough for three guys to get themselves dressed in camouflage when one of those guys is Wally. We all got dressed fine—Gabe and Wally in the greens and me in the tan, since it was the only thing that would fit—but when I tried to rub green paint on Wally’s face, he started hyperventilating. Gabe attempted to reason with him, but we eventually gave up and made him wear a dark green and brown camo net over his clothing. By the time we were ready, we only had seven minutes to hide.

  “Let’s split up,” I said. “You and Wally find a place in the woods. I’ll go up to the rocky areas with the duffle.” Which I had wrapped in the other tan camo shirt.

  And so we ran for it. Gabe and Wally ditched me in the woods, and I kept going up. I was in excellent shape, and it was early and still cool, but by the time I ran halfway to Eagle Rock, I really wanted to peel off some layers.

  The fog was awesome. The higher I got, the less I could see. It was like walking inside a cloud. I probably was.

  It occurred to me that I’d picked the wrong clothing. There was a lot more greenery up here than I remembered from our last hike, and the duffle and I were dressed to blend in with rock and dirt. I kept my eye out for rockier ground. If it came down to it, I could probably hide in one of the caves up top, but Diakonos would instantly find me if one of them looked inside.

  I passed a cluster of small boulders. The biggest one was the size of a yoga ball, the smallest the size of a basketball. I stashed the bag vertically behind some of the rocks and adjusted the shirt so it was smooth on the round end of the bag. That way it looked like one more boulder in the bunch. It almost seemed too easy.

  But I still had my giant self to hide, and the time was up. Diakonos was probably already on its way.

  I reached the top of Eagle Rock. Last time I stood there I’d been able to see the Santa Monica pier. Today I couldn’t see ten feet in front of me. I looked down. It was a pretty straight drop. People like to rock climb here. Maybe if I went back a bit, where the bushes turned to rock . . .

  I backtracked and found a steep incline, maybe twenty degrees. There were a couple decent footholds down there. Perhaps I could just stand, pressed against the rock.

  It took me a while to get down. I wasn’t the nimblest of climbers and ended up sliding most of the way. I had no idea how I was going to get back up. By the time I was in position, facing the cliff, my grandpa’s watch read 10:37 a.m.

  After running all that way wearing several layers and a hat and gloves, then standing in a precarious location for a half hour, I was burning up. I needed to get some air flowing before I passed out. So I unbuttoned the front of my jacket and untucked my T-shirt. The cool air snaked up my torso and into my pits and felt so nice.

  Until it started to rain.

  It wasn’t a heavy rain, just a sprinkle, but it was enough to make me uncomfortable. Looking back, the whole thing was dumb and dumber. I didn’t have any climbing gear to anchor myself. And Mr. S had spent all year preaching about being prepared for any weather conditions, which I was currently not.

  “Man, I don’t think he’s up here.”

  My whole body tensed at the nearness of Lukas’s voice.

  “Yes, he is,” Nick said. “Trust me. Garmond is used to looking down on the world.”

  “He’s too big to be up here. We’d see him.”

  “Hey, Garmond!” Nick yelled. “You win! Come on out.”

  “That’s cheating,” Lukas said.

  “There’s no cheating in real life, Rodriquez,” Nick said. “You survive, or you don’t. If Garmond is dumb enough to fall for me yelling ‘game over,’ then we win. End of story.”

  “Whatever. I’m going to check the caves,” Lukas said.

  Good thing I hadn’t hid in the caves.

  “Hey, Lukas! Check out these trampled bushes!” Nick yelled, then mumbled, “Never mind.”

  Nick’s steps magnified through the rock. It sounded like he was climbing above my head. I didn’t dare move. A pebble fell down inches from my face, then a stone about the size of an Oreo. Then one hit the top of my head. I flinched.

  “How the heck did you get down there, Garmond?”

  Mother pus bucket. Of all the people who could have found me, why Nick?

  I decided to stay put, hoping he wasn’t positive he’d found me, that he was only guessing.

  “Lukas! I found him! Mark the time!”

  So much for that plan.

  The sound of Lukas’s footsteps grew as he ran my way. They suddenly stopped. “Wow!” he said. “How’d you get down there, man?”

  I finally looked up, squinting against the rain sprinkling my face. “I slid.”

  Lukas chucked. “Now how you going to get back up?”

  “Hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

  “I say we leave him,” Nick said.

  Lukas got down on his stomach and reached out his hand. “Just grab on. We’ll pull you up.” He slapped Nick’s leg. “Come on, man.”

  Nick groaned, but got down on his stomach as well. Yet I wasn’t close enough to reach either of their hands. I needed a boost. I grabbed at the rock, looking for a handhold, but it was smooth. Gravity had gotten me down here, and it wasn’t going to help me back up.

  I looked down to see where I could get a foothold, and my shirt billowed in the way. Nice.

  I lifted my foot, using the toe of my boot to feel for the foothold I knew was there. I should just tuck in my shirt so I could see the thing, but then my boot found it.

  “Coming up.” I jumped off the foothold. Lukas grabbed one of my hands, Nick the other, and they held me there, our bent arms straining.

  Nick swore. “You weigh a ton, Garmond.”

  My boots pedaled against
the rock, looking for another ledge. I felt my left hand slip a bit. “Lukas.”

  “Our gloves are wet, man,” Lukas said. “Go back down so we can get a better hold.”

  I gritted my teeth and breathed out my nose. “I can’t go back down. I can’t see the ledge.”

  “Try, man! Please! I’m dropping—” Lukas cursed.

  My left hand slid from his. He fell back. Out of sight. My weight pulled Nick’s arm straight, and I dropped several inches.

  Nick reached his other hand over the ledge, trying to grab me with both. His body slid toward the edge. He reached his other hand back to anchor himself. “I’m going to drop him. Lukas!”

  Lukas looked over the ledge again. “What can I do?”

  “Hold me,” Nick said. “He’s slipping. I need both hands.”

  Lukas disappeared, and, I figured, grabbed onto Nick, who made a grab for me with his other hand.

  But it was too late.

  My glove slipped out of his and I fell.

  I scraped down the rocky incline, going faster than I wanted to. My adrenaline skyrocketed. I fell through the top of a tree that was growing out of a crack in the rock. The branches clawed at me like some kind of werewolf. My face, hands, and chest got the worst of it. I floundered, grabbed a spindly top branch, but my fist slid right down it, popping off all the leaves and heating my palm through my glove.

  And then I fell straight, off the cliff and down, like stepping off a diving board. Only there was no water to greet me. Only sagebrush, dirt, and rocks.

  I was going to die.

  But no. I could land it, maybe. Like jumping off the roof of a house.

  I bent my knees, hoping to absorb my weight. I stuck the landing at first, but my torso shifted, twisting me. My left leg popped. I fell, hit the ground on my back, and kept sliding down the incline backwards, head first.

  Mother pus bucket! My leg throbbed like I’d been electrocuted from hip to toe. I crossed my arms and tucked my chin against my chest like we learned until I slid to a stop in some chaparral.

  I was shaking all over, hot, and focused entirely on the excruciating pain in my left leg. Or maybe it was my knee. Had I broken something? Oh God, please no.