Chapter 17
The following evening, after another cold, bland meal in the hot, humid restaurant, Geri and Quinn went outside to smoke on the patio. Neither had said much during dinner with their fellow competitors. Those meals were getting quieter and quieter as time went on; everyone was too scared, too tired, and too beaten down to do anything except stare into space and eat the awful food.
Geri had been planning for a long time to give up smoking, even as the stress of running Cole Industries had driven her from one to two packs a day. Now that she was here, she was glad she’d brought smokes; it was one of the only things that kept her more or less sane.
But her cigarettes weren’t going to last forever, and neither were the people trapped here. She wasn’t interested in waiting around to see if she could win this game and survive—she wanted out. Now.
All day long, while they’d shoveled sand on the beach again, she’d been thinking about this morning’s conversation with Quinn and formulating an escape plan. She’d tried and tried to come up with a way to get them all out of here, but the logistics just didn’t work. Two people might be able to slip away undetected. Ten? Not likely.
That didn’t sit right, but she didn’t know what the alternative was.
We can come back for them. If we let the authorities know what’s happening, they’ll help. They have to.
She hoped, anyway. She’d sure as hell try.
“I’ve been thinking about what we talked about yesterday,” she said quietly to Quinn.
He blew out some vapor. “Yeah?”
“Mmhmm.” She flicked her eyes toward him. “How sore are you?”
“I could stand some painkillers and a massage,” he grumbled.
“Do you think you can run?”
Quinn tensed. “Run?”
She nodded.
He studied her, and he seemed to catch on: she wanted to do this, and she wanted to do it now . Bringing his vape pen to his lips, he said, “Yeah. I can run.”
“Okay.” She broke eye contact as she took a drag from her cigarette. She scanned the patio as casually as she could, assessing where the various guards were and what they were doing. Without looking at him, she quietly said, “There’s a six-foot drop over this railing.” She leaned against it. “From there, it’s about five yards to the tree line.”
She sensed him watching her, but she didn’t confirm it.
He blew out some sweet-scented vapor. “Okay.”
“Once we make a move, we can’t hesitate. They’ll shoot us before we reach the trees.”
In her peripheral vision, he nodded.
“Get into the trees and run like hell. The undergrowth is probably dense, so we might need to get closer to the beach, but stay under the cover of trees as much as possible.”
“Which way do we go?”
“West. If the hotel is behind you and you’re not running into the beach or the airstrip, you’re going the right way.”
A quiet grunt of acknowledgment answered that. Then, “What happens next?”
“I’ve got my phone and my signal booster.” She dropped her cigarette and crushed it under her heel. “I think once we get far enough away—even a mile or two—their signal jammers won’t work anymore.” She turned to him. “Then we call for help and hope for the best.”
Quinn nodded grimly. It wasn’t a perfect plan, and there were a lot of ways it could go wrong, but he didn’t seem to have any notes.
She picked up her cigarette and tossed it in the ashtray. Then she hoisted herself up on the railing, wincing as her exhausted body protested.
One of the sentries looked in their direction, and he tensed as if he were expecting them to make some kind of move.
Geri stayed on the railing, and Quinn continued leaning against it beside her, and they kept talking about benign bullshit until the sentry lost interest in them. Then for another ten or fifteen minutes after that.
Under her breath, Geri asked, “Ready?”
“When you are.”
She nodded and swept her gaze around again. The sentries were bored and disengaged.
“I’m going to distract them,” she murmured.
“Got it.”
She adjusted her grip on the railing. Then she took a deep breath and shouted, “Where’s he going?” She pointed toward the path leading from the balcony toward the cliffs behind the hotel. “Oh fuck, I think he’s going to jump!”
That was enough to turn the sentry’s heads, and she seized their momentary distraction to swing her legs around and drop to the ground below. Her sore ankles and knees screamed at the impact, and she stumbled a step or two, then righted herself and sprinted across the open lawn toward the trees. She didn’t look back to make sure Quinn had followed.
There was shouting behind her. A second after she cleared the tree line, gunfire cracked through the stillness. Birds scattered. Bark flew off the side of a tree trunk. She kept running, using trees to keep herself upright when her feet tangled in the undergrowth.
There were too many bushes, vines, and invisible tree roots to make much progress.
Over her shoulder, she called out, “Head for the beach!”
“Right behind you!” Quinn’s voice almost made her stumble with sheer relief. He’d made it this far.
Bullets still whistled through the jungle. One lodged into a tree in an explosion of bark. Another grazed a trunk just inches from Geri’s shoulder.
There were shouts behind them too, but they faded as Geri and Quinn ran deeper into the woods. Gunfire still cracked, but the bullets went well wide of them or lodged in trees long before reaching them.
Geri would’ve liked to run until they were at least a mile or two away, but two long days of shoveling sand had taken its toll. Sooner than she wanted, they slowed to a brisk walk. Then a more sedate pace. As frantic as she was to get as far from the hotel as possible, they just couldn’t keep running. If they collapsed from exhaustion, they’d be screwed.
Fine. They’d walk. At least they were moving.
She paused to glance back and scan their surroundings. No movement. No signs of life.
She continued, but as she took another step through some dense bushes, an odd metallic sound stopped her in her tracks. “Did you hear that?”
Quinn halted and turned to her. “Hear what?”
She experimentally lifted her foot, then put it down again. Sure enough, metal scraped.
Quinn came closer. “What is that?”
“I don’t know.” She leaned down and brushed some leaves out of the way. Light glinted off something silver, and she craned her neck. “What the fuck…”
He joined her and looked closer. “Is that… Is that barbed wire?”
“Worse.” She eased her foot off and carefully stepped back, making sure she didn’t get tangled and lose her balance. “It’s concertina wire.”
“Like—razor wire?”
“Basically.” She stepped back and squinted at the undergrowth. Now that she knew what to look for, she saw it—the telltale blue-white sheen of sharp metal catching the light. Coiled wire wound between trees in a long serpentine, mostly enveloped by the fronds and vines of plants on the jungle floor. It was impossible to say if it had been put here deliberately, or if it had been discarded or dropped somehow.
Either way, they had to assume this wasn’t the only one.
“Be careful,” she told Quinn as she started picking her way through the foliage again. “There could be more.”
He grunted in acknowledgment, and his steps sounded slow and cautious behind her.
“Maybe we should move on to the beach,” he suggested. “At least then we can see if there’s wire.”
Geri chewed her lip. He had a point. “We’ll be more vulnerable out there.”
“We can run from people.” He gestured at the wire they were avoiding. “If we get tangled in that…”
“True. Okay, let’s head for the beach.”
They took a diagonal path, continuing up the island while also getting closer to the coast. The more distance they put between them and the hotel, the better. All the way to the beach and as they trudged through the sand, Geri didn’t see any more wire; hopefully that continued. The last thing they needed was—
“Stop.”
She halted and turned. “What?”
At first, all she heard was the squawking and singing of birds throughout the jungle. But then she heard it—the whump-whump-whump of a helicopter.
“Shit,” she muttered. “Get back in the woods!”
They scrambled into the jungle again, moving fast but also watching out for more concertina wire.
The tree canopy wasn’t terribly dense—a fair amount of sunlight made it through—but the bushes could provide cover.
“Get down!” she ordered.
Quinn didn’t argue, and they dove under some bushes. Something bit into Geri’s arm and leg, and for a panicked heartbeat, she thought she’d just embedded herself in some more hidden concertina wire. To her relief, it was just some stickers on one of the many vines.
“Stay still,” she said to Quinn as the helicopter flew closer. “The less the bushes move, the less they’ll see.”
“Got it.”
They both stayed still and silent. Overhead, the helicopter came closer. It seemed to be following the edge of the jungle, and Geri’s spine prickled as it flew painfully slowly over their position. She thought it stopped and hovered, but she couldn’t be sure; the noise was so loud now, it was hard to pinpoint if the helo was even moving anymore.
Finally, it seemed to be heading away from them, continuing west along the island’s long coast. She and Quinn stayed in their hiding places. For several minutes, they listened. The helicopter was gone, and there were no sounds except for birds singing and shrieking, but they didn’t dare move yet.
After a good fifteen or twenty minutes, the aircraft hadn’t come back their way, so they crept out into the open again, both scanning their surroundings for movement.
“I think we’re good,” he said.
Geri nodded. “Me too. And I think we’re far enough from the hotel to see if we’ve got some signal.”
At the very edge of the jungle, Geri leaned against a boulder. Quinn sat on a fallen tree. She fired up her phone. Unsurprisingly, it had no signal. Then she turned on the booster. Its LED blinked yellow as it searched.
“Come on, come on,” she muttered.
“You think it’ll find something?”
“It should. These are designed to connect with satellites from literally anywhere.” She tilted her head back in the direction of the hotel. “I don’t even know what kind of jammer they’re using that interferes with—”
The yellow LED stopped blinking.
A solid red one came on instead.
No signal.
“Fuck.” She tried again. Still no luck. “For fuck’s sake.” She shut it all off and pocketed it. “We need to get farther away.”
Quinn grunted, and they continued up the beach, staying as close to the trees as they could.
They made it another mile or so without issue. No helicopters. No foot pursuit. No concertina wire. She didn’t let herself get even cautiously optimistic at this point; Rich’s people had the home advantage, and unless she and Quinn could magically teleport off this island, they were fucked until proven otherwise.
“All right.” She stopped and took out the devices again. “Let’s try this again.”
“Fingers crossed,” he muttered as she turned them on.
Geri nodded—fingers definitely crossed.
She held her breath as the LED blinked yellow. For a discouragingly long time, it kept blinking, searching, searching, searching…
And then…
It turned green .
“It’s working,” she said, and unlocked her phone. She turned on her location settings, then sent her location to Beth and Andrew. She followed that with a text message:
SOS. Need help. Urgent! Send help to Faraway Resort ASAP!
Then she shut off both the booster and phone.
“I don’t want to waste the batteries,” she explained to Quinn. “And if our host has signal jammers powerful enough to block this thing”—she gestured with the booster—“then we have to assume they can track signals too.”
Quinn scowled. “That means they could still be tracking us now.”
Her gut clenched. She stared down at the devices in her hand. That was the double-edged sword of transmitting a signal—it couldn’t only be received by the intended recipient. And whether it was turned on or off, a smartphone could still be tracked. Removing the battery wouldn’t even help.
But they were short on options, so she tucked the phone and booster into her pockets. “Let’s keep moving. I’ll check the phone again in a while and see if we got a response. We’ll keep an eye on the water, and hopefully the Coast Guard or someone comes looking for us.”
“Do you have your lighter?”
“Yeah. Why?” But as soon as she asked, she understood.
“If we see a boat or something, our best way to send a message is with a smoke signal.”
“True. All right, let’s keep going. The longer we stand here, the more likely we are to be found by the wrong people.”
So, they continued. Geri’s legs were aching and shaky as if she’d just finished an arduous hike up a damn mountain. Her muscles felt like rubber bands—precarious and loose.
I am never complaining about leg day ever again.
Especially because that would mean she was safe at home with access to a gym, back in a life where a tough leg day registered as something unpleasant.
The thought would’ve made her mouth water if she wasn’t so damn parched.
One miserable, aching step after another, she and Quinn put more distance between them and the Faraway Resort.
And each step took them closer to freedom.