“That was freaking amazing!” Cory laughs, lying on the rocks next to me.
“You’re crazy.” The adrenaline is slowly wearing off, but my entire body is shaking like a leaf.
“What happened to your shoot?” He sits up and undoes his straps.
I remain lying down. “President Volkov made sure I got the malfunctioning parachute…”
“Are you serious?”
I nod.
“Nicholas talked to me last night, but in all honesty, I didn’t believe him. Hadn’t I seen what happened just here, I still wouldn’t have believed him. But he’s right. And I’m here to help.” He stands up and offers me his hand. I take it and he hauls me up.
While tearing out of my harness, I look for a sign or some type of instructions of what we’re supposed to do, but there is none. However, it’s hard to miss a few participants running toward the erupting mountain.
Cory’s eyes are already staring the volcano down. “Let’s do this thing.”
Eight cages. One of them is mine.
We start to run right away. The ground is black with a few splotches of grass and white flowers. The island is a mountain shaped like a cone with a small jungle area and a white ash cloud billowing from the peak, lava running down the side of it.
“So are you two…you know…” Cory starts.
“Don’t go there,” I snap, running alongside him, trying to keep up.
“Just wondering.”
We sprint up the rocky, black hill toward the base of the volcano, and I’m breathing heavily.
“I saw what happened,” Arthor says, coming up beside me, panting.
“Yeah, that…prick,” I reply between breaths. “I got a defective parachute.”
“Volkov sure wants you dead,” Arthor says.
I’m glad Arthor is here. I know I can trust him. We run all the way until we get to the base of the mountain. There are hundreds of buckets, a scale, and a sign that says:
Fill two buckets with twenty-five pounds of rocks in each. Carry buckets to the opening of the volcano.
Fifty pounds—roughly half my weight. Like the others, I grab two buckets and start to load them with black rocks. Once they’re filled, I prop one of the buckets on top of the scale and weigh it. Twenty-three pounds. I add another two rocks and the scale tips to twenty-five pounds. As quickly as I can, I repeat the process with the other bucket. Some of the participants have found thick sticks and are laying them across their upper backs, hooking one bucket on either end. I head into the wooded area and search for a stick. After searching for a few seconds, it becomes clear to me that all the good ones are already taken.
Defeated, I return to my buckets. Wrapping my fingers around the handles, tightening my core, I lift them up. Fifty pounds is much heavier than I thought it would be. Some of these guys probably weigh two hundred and fifty pounds, and picking this up is like picking up a pair of shoes or a washcloth. But even though this isn’t fair at all, I’m not going to let President Volkov win. Instead, I’m going to make my anger feed my strength and determination.
I plant my feet firmly on the mountainside—the ground black and crinkled like an old man’s skin. A vain of red liquid with a black, cracking crust flows down the volcano and it’s difficult to find a flat surface where my feet won’t slip.
Cory walks next to me, and as I thought, it looks like the fifty pounds he’s carrying weighs the same as a toothpick with cotton balls on the sides.
“You had better watch out down here,” he says. “I mean, I don’t see how you can make it with President Volkov after you. He could send snipers after you, plant bombs, poison…”
“I don’t need to hear all the details.”
“Sorry, sometimes I get carried away thinking about all the possible hazards. It’s an obsession, I suppose. But seriously, you need to take extra precautions.”
I step over a rock. President Volkov just has to be right, and since he says girls can’t be in Savage Run, he must make sure I fail so he doesn’t look like an idiot.
As we get closer to the volcano, the air turns thicker and hotter and hissing sounds come from the ground. Each step, my legs burn, feeling weaker, and sweat is dripping down my face and chest.
Almost up at the top, I start to become careless about where I tread and with one misstep, I twist my ankle and fall to the ground. The rocks in my bucket go tumbling down the mountain, and the buckets too.
“You all right?” Cory asks.
“I’m fine. Just keep going. I’ll be right behind you.” Cory reluctantly starts to walk off, but when I assure him again that I’m fine, he moves on.
Arthor, who walks behind me, drops his buckets and catches mine so they don’t go tumbling down all the way. He proceeds to fill them with the rocks. I sit for a moment, wondering if I’ll be disqualified if I lost any of my rocks or if I’ll be required to climb all the way back down to the bottom and get more rocks. There’s no way we’ll find all of them. I might as well start climbing back down because if I show up with a bucket weighing less than twenty-five pounds, I won’t be able to continue. “It’s no use!” I yell after him, letting my arms fall to the ground. He looks up from where he’s searching.
“There are just a few more!”
I press my lips together and stare at him for a moment. “No! They’ll disqualify both of us if you help me.”
“There’s no rule that says you’ll be disqualified for accepting help.”
I move my ankle in a circular motion and it feels like something is stuck inside of it, like it’s locked. Arthor continues down the mountain without my approval. After a few minutes he returns with more rocks, but I know he didn’t get all of them because one of my buckets is only three quarters of the way full.
“It will have to do,” he says.
“No it won’t.” I stand up and look at the buckets, not placing too much weight on my injured ankle, afraid I might cringe and that he’ll notice that I hurt it.
“It will do. No one’s going to weigh the buckets up there.”
Looking down the mountainside, I see Timothy and Danny climbing up together. And after them comes Johnny and in the far distance there are two other guys I don’t know. “Crap.”
Arthor turns around and sees Johnny, too.
I pick up the buckets. “You go ahead.” I want him to go first so he doesn’t see me hobble. I step onto my well leg first, but when I put weight onto my bad ankle, I feel a stabbing pain shoot up my leg. I grit my teeth and hold my breath so that I don’t let out a single sound. I only have about twenty feet to go before I reach the top; I have to make it. Grunting and willing myself to walk, I continue onward. My ankle starts to feel swollen in my shoe, the skin pressing against the material. One step more, I tell myself. Just one more. I want to cry out from the pain, but I force the scream back down to where it came from and blow instead. Ever step is another one conquered.
Finally reaching the top, I hear some of the participants discussing where to go next. I set the buckets down glad the climb is finished.
“Can you believe it?” Arthor says.
“What?
“The sign says that the entrance to the Caves of Choice is down the volcano. The path is so narrow that only one participant can descend at a time,” Arthor says.
Timothy and Danny arrive together and set their buckets down. Danny gives a high five to Cory. Do they know each other?
“I’ll go first.” Trying to hide the fact that I’m injured, I walk as normally as I can over to the edge of the crater and look down. The boiling sea of magma moves like an aggressive, live creature and heat rises into my face, and feels like it’s going to melt my skin and eyes. The cave walls will be hotter than hell and we’ll roast alive if we climb down. Surely they can’t mean that we have to climb down here? All of us will burn to death and I’m sure President Volkov doesn’t want that.
I glance at the sign and it reads:
Next obstacle: Caves of Choice—climb into the red caverns.
The sign mentions pleural caverns. This is only one. “Are there any other caverns on the island?” I ask to anyone listening.
“Playing detective?” Johnny asks, setting down his buckets. There’s a second of awkward silence and a series of careful glances.
Johnny’s eyebrows sink toward his eyes as he stares at me. Wiping his dripping wet forehead, he slinks toward me.
I swallow—fully aware that with one shove, he could send me into the volcano, but Cory steps in Johnny’s path before Johnny reaches me. Johnny forms a fist and punches Cory in the face, sending him to the ground.
“Stop!” I yell—this could end very badly.
But Johnny doesn’t stop. Instead, he kicks Cory in the gut and Cory rolls on the ground, grabbing his abdomen, gasping for air. Arthor and Timothy respond right away, immobilizing Johnny by grabbing his arms. Johnny wrings and kicks, spewing out obscenities. Slowly, Cory rises to his feet and I see that he has blood on the side of his mouth. He walks behind Johnny, calm and strong as an oak tree, and slams his fist into the back of Johnny’s skull. Johnny drops to the ground unconscious.
“Should we just finish him off?” Timothy says, glancing down into the volcano.
A huge part of me wants that—I’d love to be rid of the threat of Johnny coming after me the rest of the course—and it would be a merciful death—he wouldn’t notice a thing—but I can’t find it in myself to kill him. “Let’s just leave him here.”
“You’re way too nice,” Timothy says.
“I didn’t think you had time to mess with this kind of stuff,” I say, quoting what he said last night.
“I thought I’d try it out—being helpful.”
Cory interrupts. “We have to keep moving forward. Just leave him here.”
I look down the mountainside and see more participants closing in on us and the slight lead we have over the others is diminishing quickly. I peer into the pit again. “If we climb down there, we’ll roast alive. There must be some other red caverns somewhere,” I say.
“I…I think I saw one down by the shore where I landed,” Arthor says. “It was a small cave and the walls were red.” He steps over to the edge of the mountain and points. “That way.”
One by one, they start to descend the mountain. Everyone except for Arthor and me.
“You’re hurt,” Arthor whispers.
I shrug my shoulders. “Just a little sprain, that’s all.”
“If it’s so little, why is your left leg swollen?”
I look down and see that he’s right; it is swollen. “Shoot.” Why now?
“Want a piggy back ride?”
I’ll be completely mortified.
“I won’t tell anyone about your ankle, I promise.”
The last thing I want is for any of the others to see that I’m injured, so they know they have an advantage over me.
I hop onto his back, wrapping my legs around his lean waist, my arms around his shoulders. He smells like a mixture between sweat and the outdoors and the perspiration on his neck and hair glistens in the sun.
Chapter 26
Arthor carries me almost all the way to the caves, gently setting me down by the base of a soaring tree, hiding me behind roots that stretch above my head and reach into the ground like giant veins. Leaning against the smooth bark, I stand on my good foot.
He peeks around the trunk at the red cave. “Looks like there are a number of them and they’re crawling in.” Turning to me, he says, “You okay to walk?”
“I’ll try.” I step onto my left foot, and right away, I feel a sharp pain. I grit my teeth, reapply pressure to my wounded leg, and take a step forward. With a little practice, and a lot of determination, I should be able to walk, though not without a limp. Arthor doesn’t say anything, only waits patiently while I take another step. It’s not easy making the muscles in my face relax.
“You good?” he asks.
“I’m ready.”
We head over to the cave’s entrance—one of several small holes in the mountain barely large enough to crawl into. I see another guy crawl into the blackness. My throat grows hot and dry.
It looks so easy for the other guy to go into the cave—like he enjoys tight spaces and darkness. I can be that way, can’t I? My chest compresses the air out of my lungs and my heart thumps wildly against my ribcage. I have become the girl who was locked up in a trunk when she was five years old, not knowing if she would ever get out.
Trying to ignore my fear, I take three deep breaths and get down on all fours. I feel the damp, leafy earth against my palms and I peer into the cave, noting the hole is no wider than one of my bicycle wheels back home. My chest feels tighter, but still, I walk my hands forward onto the smooth, cold, red surface of the cave’s entrance, and stick my head into the cavern. All I see is blackness.
Why am I doing this? I’m crazy! I can’t do it. I crawl backwards in retreat, stand up, and limp away from the cave, interlocking my fingers behind my neck.
“Heidi!” Arthor follows after me.
“I can’t do it! It’s too tight—too dark.”
He walks backwards right in front of me, reaching his hands to my shoulders and pushes against them so I have to stop.
“Yes, you can,” he says.
“What do you know about what I can and can’t do?”
“I know that you’re strong and brave and caring. And that you won’t let an obstacle like this one keep you from your freedom. Or Gemma’s.”
In a moment of fear, I forgot why I’m doing this in the first place. Gemma. “If the caves were just a little wider, maybe, but they’re so tight.” I glance back at the hole in the mountain.
He squeezes my shoulders gently. “I have to keep going, Heidi. Every second we wait, someone else might make it to one of those eight cages.”
The cages. What am I doing? Will I let one day from my past prevent me from having a life of freedom? I have to be in one of those eight. And I have to finish this course so I can find out for myself if Gemma is still alive. “I’m going in.” I limp toward the cave’s entrance, pushing my way past two participants, and before anyone’s able to object about me sneaking in line, I crawl into the hole. Right away, blackness surrounds me. Normally the darkness combined with the tight space would bother me, but not now. I’m too angry with my father for what he did to me. Too angry with myself for allowing fear to set me back.
Pebbles and dust stick to my palms as I edge forward, and the air smells of mold mixed with sulfur. Within minutes, the cave’s walls close in so much that I’m forced down onto my elbows and stomach, slinking forward like a snake. I try not to think about where I am, that I’m inside a tight cave with millions of pounds of rocks and lava looming above me. But the thoughts just creep back in. I grit my teeth and press forward, fighting to ignore the growing tightness in my chest.
I steer my thoughts to other things. Why are these caves called Caves of Choice anyway? It’s rather a weird name for a cave. Do I have to choose something? Or maybe the path will divide in several directions, forcing me to decide which path to take, and if I don’t take the right one, I’ll be lost in here forever. The space around me is getting tighter—I find it impossible to exhale and my hands and arms feel weak and are trembling. I had better think about something else quick.
In an attempt to distract myself, I think back to Nicholas’s and my first kiss. I recall the scratchy coats against my back, his soft, wet lips on mine…I didn’t even give a second thought to being in a tight closet with him. He made me feel so safe and…calm. Just like Gemma. Just like Ruth.
I speed up so I can be done with this faster, however, soon I’m pushing against a pair of feet.
“Hurry it up!” I yell.
“I’m trying, okay? It’s really tight in here.”
I inch behind an unknown guy, the smell of dirt, popcorn, and plastic becoming too strong to bear. “Go faster!” The walls are pressing away the air around me and my hands are cold and clammy.
“I see a light up ahead,” the guy in front of me says.
A light? We’ve hardly been crawling for ten minutes, fifteen at the most. This can’t possibly be the end of this obstacle, can it? There must be something else—I’m sure they wouldn’t make this part of the obstacle so easy. Once we progress a little more, I see the light shining beyond the guy ahead of me, too, and I’m so relieved that tears well from my eyes. I crawl forward, and finally at the end, I step out and into a large, enclosed cave.
The cave’s walls are rust red, and are tinged with green and blue algae. Dozens of clear booths stand in a large circle, and inside the booths, participants are holding a gun, appearing to be shooting at nothing. One of the participants is grabbing his hair and is screaming. Just as his face catches the light, I see tears wetting his cheeks. What would drive him to such despair? The guy ahead of me runs toward one of stalls and enters it. When I step onto my left foot, I clench my teeth and grunt. The pain is still intense, but I can’t afford to let anyone else know that I’m injured.
I hear a faint hissing sound, and the air around me turns cloudy. The mist rises to my face and seeps into my nose and mouth, causing me to cough, turning my surroundings blurry. I feel like the back of my skull is falling, and unable to hold my balance, I press my hand to the damp cavern wall, lowering my head so I won’t pass out. What’s happening to me?
Fortunately, it doesn’t take long before the dizziness passes, and once again, I can make out the details of the cave. To my astonishment, there’s only one booth left with my name on it— everything else has vanished.
“Hello?” I take a few steps backward, shrinking against the glistening wall. “Is anyone here?” My voice bounces off the rocks and echoes on down the cave.
Savage Run Page 24