Race with Danger (Run for Your Life Book 1) (11 page)

I know he understands how alone you can feel even when you’re surrounded by people. His father, Marisela’s brother, is dead. His mother works in a factory in Juarez, or at least Emilio supposes she still does; he hasn’t heard from her in four years.

“I love you, Tee.” He dips his chin and stares intently at the camera lens. “Be careful, sweetheart.”

Do I love Emilio Santos? I care about him. I miss him. I’d hurt if he were wounded; I’d be devastated if he died. Is that love?

“You, too,” I finally say. “Watch your back. And all your other parts, too. I can’t wait to see you in person.”

He purses his lips in a kiss to the camera; and I kiss the palm of my hand and then blow that kiss in the direction of the screen.

“’Night, Shadow.”

After I end the call, I have Maddie and Jason and Shadow and Bailey all weighing on my heart. Sebastian’s waiting with our guards. I ask him if I can borrow a satellite phone for a minute.

He turns to his minders. One wants to know who I’m going to call.

“A colleague at work,” I say.

“Stand here,” he says, pointing to his right side. Then he hands me his phone.

I would much rather have had a little privacy, but it’s better than nothing. I check the time, then I call Sabrina. It’s a little after six a.m. in Seattle. She’ll be up. We Habitat Maintenance Technicians have to start work early so the public doesn’t see all the crap that accumulates overnight in the animal cages.

“Tana?” she squeals. “I can’t believe you’re calling me. I was just watching the news. God, was it awful?”

“More awful than you can imagine.” Tears abruptly blur my vision.
Shrug it off,
I tell myself,
it’s past
. I don’t want to relive that scene. I take a deep breath. “How are things?”

“Same ol’, same ol’,” she says. “You-Know-Who slammed Jack into a fence yesterday.”

“He probably deserved it.” I sigh. “Tell the director that no matter what happens here, I
will
take care of everything when I get home.”

I don’t know how I can keep that promise if I don’t win, and now I’m not even sure I can keep it if I do. But I have to find a way.

“I will tell him,” she says. “But maybe you need to prepare yourself for the inevitable.”

I ignore that. “I’ll be back in a few days. You have to tell him.”

“You are not responsible for what happens to him, Tana.”

“I want to be the one who saves him.”

She doesn’t respond.

After a sad moment of silence, I say, “Don’t let them take Bailey away.”

I hang up only after she promises. I hand the phone back. The secret squirrel raises an eyebrow. I ignore him.

As the robots walk us to our tent, Sebastian wants to know what that call was about.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I tell him.

Tonight when I perform my nightly ritual, the sounds of the surrounding jungle seem subdued. The air seems more oppressive than the two previous nights. The full moon looks so heavy that it might fall out of the sky. The deep shadows it casts show the infinite variety of shapes and textures in the tropical landscape, although everything is rendered in black and white.

“Tonight, I am grateful to be alive and in one piece,” I whisper to the stars.

Sebastian, standing a few yards away from me, murmurs quietly, “Amen.”

I dream that I’m being threatened by President T.L. Garrison. “How dare you endanger my son!” he bellows in my face, leaning close. His breath is foul.

I struggle to get away, but I’m tied to a chair. I’m also wearing the pendant around my neck.

He lifts it from my chest and wraps his fingers around it. I feel the elephant hair cord tighten against the back of my neck.

“Do you know Amy Robinson?” he asks, frowning.

I say nothing. Then I see Mom pass by the open doorway behind him. She pauses a second and holds her finger in front of her lips.

What the hell?

Then Aaron is dragged into the room by two ninjas. He’s still nine years old. Blood drips down from a gash on his throat. He’s screaming.

“No! Leave him alone!” My screams join my brother’s. “Aaron!”

Aaron’s screams stop when one of the ninjas holds a knife to his throat, threatening to finish the job. My brother’s hazel eyes, so similar to my own, beseech me for help.

“Why should you care what happens to this boy?” Garrison wants to know. “You don’t even know him. Zany Grey has no say in this.” He nods to the ninja holding the knife.

“I’m Amelia!” I yell. “Amelia Robinson!”

Then the Prez digs his fat fingers into my shoulder and puts his face close to mine.

“I knew it,” he growls.

My eyes burst open. It’s dark in the tent. Sebastian is sitting on the edge of my cot, one hand on my shoulder, shaking me. I sit up, gasping. My heart is hammering. I swat his hand away.

His hair is loose. He pushes it out of his face. “Nightmare?”

A Secret Service guy sticks his head inside the tent flap.

Sebastian dismisses him with a curt, “Bad dream, Silverman. Leave us alone.”

Silverman slips back out.

“Amelia?” Bash murmurs softly.

“What?” I’m still shivering in fear, and my heart is beating so loudly I can hardly hear his words.

“You said, ‘I’m Amelia. Amelia Robinson.’”

How dare my subconscious betray me like that? I take a breath, try to work some saliva back into my dry mouth. “I was having a really bad dream.”

“Obviously.” He waits for details.

I scramble to come up with something plausible. “I dreamed I was pretending to be a friend of mine—Amelia Robertson.” I pronounce the T in the last name carefully. Surely there are thousands of girls in the U.S. with that name.

“You sounded scared.”

More fiction leaps into my brain. “I was terrified. There was this firing squad. They announced they were going to shoot everyone except for Amelia Robertson. We were all claiming to be Amelia.”

“Huh.”

Does he sound skeptical?

“It was a nightmare, Bash. They don’t have to make sense.”

I lick my dry lips and glance around at the canvas walls. Did I yell Aaron’s name, too?

“How loud was I?” I ask. Would the name of Amelia Robinson mean anything to our guards?

“I don’t think you woke up anyone else,” he says drowsily. “You okay now?”

“I’m okay.”

He yawns as he steps back and sits on his cot. “Then good night, Amelia.”

I bury my face in my pillow.
Amelia!
I lie there cursing for a half hour before I drift off again.

Mount Everett, the highest point on the island, is the next checkpoint. No, not Everest, but Everett, who, we are told, was the general who first got the brilliant idea of using this island for bomb practice. Like that deserves commemorating his name.

The route seems fairly straightforward—approximately a mile up and over the low rise beyond the camp and then through the jungle, down through a valley with a small stream, and then a steep climb up the mountain, which is a volcano, high enough that it will have snow at the summit. We can’t see the top from our current position in this jungle camp.

I’m glad we still have one remaining climbing rope and two harnesses. Yes, they’re heavy. But we are going up a mountain on the fourth day of the race, which also means we’ll have to come down tomorrow to finish on the beach. There might be cliffs to scale along the way. And this is equipment that none of the other teams thought to bring along. Score one for me.

This morning the land mine incident seems distant, like a horror movie we were forced to watch. Jason was evacuated by helicopter yesterday. He’s reported to be alive but in critical condition. I wonder where they took him.

Mr. and Mrs. Hatt flew out at dawn on another helicopter. They took Maddie’s remains with them. Just like my family, all reminders of Maddie and Jason have been erased from this place.

Three years ago, when I called my brother’s school to see if they knew what had happened, I was told the Robinsons had moved.

“Somewhere out of the country, I believe,” the secretary said.

Next I called my own school, pretending to be a relative. “Amelia Robinson has been reported as a runaway,” said the man who answered the phone. “If you have any information about her, please call this hotline.” He rattled off an 800 number. “
Do
you have any information about where she is?” he asked.

I hung up.

It took me another day to screw up enough courage to find another pay phone and call the 800 number.

A male voice answered. “Runaway Reports.”

“Is this the police?”

“No, Runaway Reports is a national agency. Do you have information about a runaway child?”

“About Amelia Robinson,” I said. “She’s not a runaway.”

“How do you know that?”

It took me a minute, because I wasn’t sure what to say. He sounded kind enough, but who was he?
Never trust what anyone says.

Then that kind-sounding voice said, “Amelia, honey, I know you’re scared. But it’s going to be okay.”

I ripped the old-fashioned receiver away from my ear and stared at the black plastic like it could suddenly become a caller ID screen.

“Stay where you are. We’ll come get you, Amelia.”

I dropped the phone and ran to the Bolt Bus station, where I spent the last of my cash to take me as far away as it could.

Now I’m farther away from home and my old life than I’ve ever been. Over breakfast, Sebastian and I learn that yesterday’s accident has had a ripple effect. After the shock of realizing that unexploded munitions could be hidden anywhere in this tropical paradise, Teams Two and Ten packed their bags and left, citing unacceptable risks to their valuable athletic careers. I suspect that excuse was mostly for saving face, though, since they were the last two teams, hours behind the leaders. There’s no prize for anything lower than third place. They didn’t have a chance unless the rest of us got blown up in the next couple of days.

So on Day Four of the Verde Island Endurance Race, the number of contenders is half what it was on Day One. Five teams, ten racers still vying for the prize. I’m thrilled about the dwindling numbers, although the major competition, Team One—Cole and Rossi—and Team Five—Senai and Mistri—are still with us and we have two days to go. I don’t know the runners on Teams Four and Eight, but I’m not counting them out, either. It’s clear that on this island, winning might come down more to survival than to cross-country running prowess.

As we eat, our minders make another feeble attempt to interest Sebastian in The Threat
.
As usual, he ignores their pleas, and as usual, nobody shares any intel with me about anything.

Since these warnings seem to be emanating from the White House, I’m guessing The Threat is a political issue. I wrack my brain to dredge up what I know about the politics of Verde Island, but I can’t even remember which country this place belongs to. Or if any nation has claimed it at all.

What political organization would care about what happens here? After seeing two people separated from their appendages yesterday, it’s hard to believe that any nebulous political risk could be as dangerous as stepping on a mine.

Catie Cole and Ricco Rossi start nearly an hour before Sebastian and I do. We see nothing of them except their footprints in the damp ground at the starting line. As soon as we enter the forest, we lose even those; the thick rotting vegetation underfoot is too uneven and springy to retain prints. Marco Senai and Suzana Mistri are scheduled to set off twenty minutes after we leave camp, and I find myself listening for them as we jog through the jungle. After the land mine episode, Sebastian and I are staying off wider paths and roads. We’ll take our chances bushwhacking or running along narrow animal trails.

Over the last three days, The President’s Son and I have become a team. Without talking, I lead for a while, and then he does. My bruises ache, the gash in my thigh alternately burns and itches, and my feet are growing blisters on top of blisters, but overall, I’m doing well, and so is my partner. Every endurance racer left in this competition has bruises and scrapes and sore muscles.

The media always asks why anyone would
volunteer
to run an endurance race. The contests are exhausting and dangerous, they point out, like we need to be reminded. I have no idea why the others do it, but personally, I think who
wouldn’t
want to have the hope of winning a mondo prize and the adventure of jogging through an exotic location? How else would I ever get to see the Yukon Territory or the Amazon or even Rocky Mountain National Park? My life has to be about more than cleaning cages.

When I run, I feel free. When I race, it doesn’t matter what my name is. It doesn’t matter that I’m poor. The only thing that matters is how fast I can find my way through unfamiliar terrain.

After some races, I get to spend a couple of extra days exploring an area, but none of us is allowed to stay here after the end of this contest. I hope they don’t have more bomb practice scheduled. Verde Island could be a pretty spectacular place if they’d stop with all the destruction. I try to enjoy what I can see of the island, although running through the landscape at high speed is not an optimum form of tourism. I spy two remarkable orange and black butterflies dancing in the air, and I surprise a large ground dwelling bird of some kind, which squawks loudly as it dashes for cover. A tropical turkey?

Sebastian, running ahead, nearly plows into a buffalo calf galloping across the trail. It bawls in fright and crashes off into the jungle after its massive mother. I pause with my partner to watch them go. We’re both panting loudly and glad to take a break.

A twig snaps behind me, and I glance over my shoulder. At first I see only the sprawling leaves of the jungle foliage, and then, between thick vertical stems, my brain zeroes in on a pair of golden eyes studying me through the bamboo and philodendrons.

The buffaloes were fleeing the tiger.

I slowly put my hand on Sebastian’s sweat-slimed arm. “Bash,” I murmur.

He turns.

“Tiger.” I add, “Don’t run.”

Two tigers live in the zoo where I work. We never clean their cage until they’re locked in their den. We’re not allowed to come closer than the length of a broom handle to the barred gate separating Habitat Maintenance Technician from big cat.

I’ve been told that tigers don’t like to attack creatures that are looking at them, so my partner and I face this silent cat. The tiger is so still that she almost looks like a painted backdrop behind the vegetation. I’m afraid to blink.

Those yellow eyes burn with such predatory intensity, assessing whether we are worthy opponents for muscle, fangs, and claws. Sebastian takes my hand and we step slowly backwards down the trail. If the cat so much as twitches, I might wet my shorts. The tiger doesn’t move, at least while we can still see her. After a few yards, her outline becomes completely invisible among the leaves. We turn and run.

“You saw her, right?” I take a quick glance over my shoulder just to be sure the tiger isn’t behind us.

“Hell, yeah,” he says, shooting a look over his shoulder, too.

The big cat doesn’t seem to be following us. Or she’s not close enough that we can see her. Still, as we plow noisily through the brush for the next two miles, my skin prickles with the anticipation of claws on my shoulders and teeth on my neck.

Intermingled with my fear of her is a pang of sympathy for that tiger. She’s the only one of her species in her world. That must be such a lonely feeling.

Today is the longest segment of the race. Sebastian and I got a late start because of our late finish yesterday, and so by the time we emerge from the jungle, the sun is already going down behind Mount Everett. The forest abruptly gives way to a mountainous landscape, barren black and gray rock carved by trickling snowmelt. The change in scenery is startling after the dense greenery we’ve been traveling through.

Sebastian slows to a walk in front of me, staring at the mountain. “Whoa!”

He shrugs off his pack, and pulls out a tube of orange energy gel.

“Yeah,” I agree with his assessment of the landscape. There’s no transition zone between the jungle and the charcoal waves of bare rock. “Must have been a hell of a lava flow.”

I pull out my own gel and squeeze a gooey caterpillar of lime paste into my mouth as I regard the scenery.

Mount Everett’s snow looks like a stocking cap, with a little tassel of clouds resting on the summit. The clouds swirl in a slow circle; the wind is blowing up there.

I think of my race around Mauna Kea on the Big Island in Hawaii, which has the same geography. This is the reason that this race is staged on Verde Island. This place has everything—heat, cold, raging rivers, snow, a volcano, jungles, snakes, tigers, buffaloes, crocodiles—what more could you want for a reality show?

Oh yeah, let’s toss in a land mine or two to spice things up a bit.

The volcano looms in front of us, an imposing natural pyramid we have to conquer before we can sleep tonight. The sunset tinges the snow at the crest a beautiful rose-gold color.

“Check it out.” I point up the mountain.

Small dots like mosquitoes zigzag across the slope above us. Cole and Rossi are not so far ahead. If Sebastian and I can keep up our current speed, we might catch them in the next couple of hours. Of course, that’s a big “if” when you’re running up the side of a mountain.

I check my wrist unit. “Four miles to go.”

“Let’s catch ‘em.” He pulls the straps of his pack over his shoulders.

We take off running again. I wish I had a camera to capture this spectacular view, but the best I can do is to look up from my feet now and then to watch the shadows lengthen and the alpenglow intensify.

At first the ground is bare rock, fractured into small shingles that slide under every step. There’s nothing approximating a trail, so we employ the strategy that every experienced mountaineer uses—we zigzag horizontally up the side of the volcano, creating our own switchbacks, which creates a longer but easier path than clawing our way straight up.

In places the slippery fractured rock transitions to sandy mud sliced by dozens of small streams. Some are narrow enough we can leap over them, but the wider ones slow us down, forcing us to cross by hopping from rock to rock. A rock turns sideways under my right foot, dunking me into an icy creek up to my knee. I yank my leg out and keep running. I feel cold wetness against my ankle, but my toes seem fine, so maybe the glacial melt didn’t penetrate beyond the cuff of my running shoe. With so few miles to go and the thought of hot food waiting for us, I’m not about to stop. My salivary glands are already working overtime as my brain conjures up visions of cheeseburgers and pork chops and mashed potatoes and spinach soufflé and cherry pie with ice cream.

We pass into the first traces of snow, streaks of white gleaming against the back side of the ridges, and then as we ascend, the snow pack becomes more dense until there’s nothing but white underfoot. The surface is icy, which makes the landscape sparkle in the setting sun, but that glittering crust is also uber-slick, and neither of us thought to pack crampons. I hope none of the others did, either. Surely Catie and Ricco are slipping and sliding ahead, too. I wonder how close Team Five and the others are behind us.

And then I remember that Madelyn Hatt is out of the competition forever. Jason, too. There are no one-legged endurance racers. Even those springy artificial feet don’t work well enough to jump ditches and climb up volcanic slopes.

The air gets thinner the higher we ascend, and soon I’m gasping, trying to suck in more oxygen with each breath. I spend most of my life at sea level; I should have trained more in the mountains. Sebastian, the native of Georgia, is affected, too. Team Seven is slowed to a trot. My mouth is dry and my head aches.