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DR. LIZ POPPED OUT of the ambulance and rushed to the UTV. “This wasn’t what I meant by taking it easy, Allie. What do we have here?”
Allie gave a succinct report on the condition of Emma and Kerry. Afterwards, she, Drake, Geneva, and Ingrid all stepped out of the way while the professionals got to work. Dr. Liz quickly stabilized her patients, and after ten minutes, the ambulance took off, leaving the four alone.
“So now what do we do?” Geneva asked.
Drake checked his watch. “We’ve got plenty of time left, and I recognize it sounds insensitive, but I think we should get back at it. We’ve only got two geocaches left. How far behind us are you guys?”
Ingrid sauntered to the UTV and retrieved the cache sheet and handed it to Drake. “One. We were going to Earth when we picked up your call over the radio.”
“Okay. You go back and get Earth, and we’ll carry on the way we were. We’ll call in Mercury, and we’ll wait at the Mars final for you to get there.”
The team split and headed for their respective geocaches.
“That was really impressive the way you jumped in there,” Geneva said. Although she pretended to watch the landscape roll by, she secretly stole occasional glances at Drake.
“It was the right thing to do, that’s all. When people need help, I believe you have to help them if you can. My dad taught me that.”
“Your dad sounds like a good man.”
Drake glanced over and caught Geneva looking at him. “He had his moments. Where are we going?”
“South by southwest, one point two miles. You ever visit your dad?”
“No. He died when I was a kid.”
“I’m sorry.”
Off in the distance, Geneva watched a small dust devil kick dirt into a horizontal cone. As quick as it appeared, it dissipated, and the cone turned into a cloud of dirt that soon settled back to the ground.
“You ever been to Boston?” she asked.
“Only the airport,” Drake answered. He spotted a pair of fresh tire tracks, determined they headed in the same direction he was, took a chance, and started following them.
“That doesn’t count,” Geneva said.
“I figured it wouldn’t. Have you ever been to Nashville?”
“Only the airport. In Memphis.” Geneva laughed.
Drake grinned. “That counts even less than my trip to Boston.”
Drake navigated around a large bush, and as he got back on course, he stole another look at Geneva. Even though her helmet obscured most of her face, he still envisioned her without, and liked what he saw. She had an oval-shaped face, a button nose, and natural lips. Best of all, though, he thought she was intelligent, funny, and was easy to talk to.
“Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?” he asked.
“Sure. I can’t wait to hear how Ingrid and Allie got along.”
“No. I mean, just the two of us.” Drake swallowed hard, not believing what he was doing.
Geneva thought about it for a bit before she answered. “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea. I came out here to spend time with Ingrid, and it wouldn’t be right to ditch her.”
“Oh. Okay.” Drake tried, but he realized he had failed at hiding the disappointment in his voice.
“Funny thing about Ingrid is, after dinner, she always likes to curl up with a book, which means I’m stuck not doing anything. Perhaps tonight I could do nothing by the fire pit behind the hotel?”
Drake smiled. “What a coincidence. I was thinking I could use a little fire pit time tonight myself. With perhaps a bottle of red wine?”
“White,” Geneva countered.
“Did I say red? I meant white. Of course, white wine always goes best with fish and fire pits.”
“Excellent,” Geneva said. “I’ll save you a seat. Turn off to the left a bit. We’re almost there.”
Drake did as he was told and stopped. Directly in front of them was a cemetery marker, reminiscent of Boot Hill.
Geneva took off her helmet and read the text. “Here lies Geo. Cash. Use his clue to find your stash. Oh, happy day, a riddle.”
They got out and checked behind the marker, found nothing, and started turning over rocks to find the next set of coordinates. They couldn’t find them, so they expanded their circle around ground zero to increase their search radius, but still came up empty. After several minutes, they returned to the marker.
“It’s got to be there,” Drake said. He approached the marker, crouched down in front of it, and looked at it closer. He ran his fingertips along the surface of the wood. “Bring me the cache sheet, will you?”
Geneva handed him the paper, and he held it against the marker, a quarter of an inch below the last word. Drake then gathered some grit from the ground and pressed it against the paper. After a few iterations, he removed the paper and gently blew away the lighter particles. Left on the paper were small indentations of numbers, stained tan.
“That’s evil,” Geneva said.
“No doubt. Give me a pen.”
Geneva handed Drake a pen, and he carefully transcribed the digits, stood up and handed the paper back to Geneva, and she entered the new coordinates into her GPS.
At the second location, they found another marker with the same inscription as before. This time, Geneva found the coordinates hidden above the first word, not under the last word. And on they went. At each waypoint, they found one marker with the same wording, with the coordinates engraved in a unique spot on the wood. At the ninth location, after twenty minutes of searching, Geneva found them on the marker’s side, near the bottom of the left edge.
She jotted down the final set of numbers, passed them to Drake, and he radioed the information to Allie.
“That’s it. One last multi and we’re done for the day,” Drake said.
“Good,” Geneva said. “I’m not really made for bouncing around in these vehicles all day.”
Drake smiled. “Allie said the same thing yesterday. I agree with you, though. My favorite daily activity has become my end of day shower when I wash all the dust away.”
Fifteen minutes later, Drake and Geneva came to the starting coordinates of the last multi-cache of the day. It surprised both of them to see three other teams milling about, including the yellow team.
Drake exited the UTV and approached Ben, who was standing off from the crowd and staring at his GPS. “Hey, what’s going on?”
“Can’t find the coordinates to the second waypoint.”
“How can that be?” Drake asked.
“I don’t know. We’ve only been here for a few minutes. Tito says they’ve been looking for almost an hour.”
“Who’s Tito?”
Ben pointed over his left shoulder. “The guy on the purple team.”
Drake left Ben and walked over toward Tito, who was involved in a conversation with one man from the brown team. Since it was entirely in Spanish, Drake couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying, but based on the body language and hand gestures, he guessed they were discussing the current geocache.
“Hey guys, what’s going on? I’m Drake.”
Drake held out his hand, and the man closest to him reached for it first. “Gilberto.”
Gilberto released his grip, and Tito introduced himself.
“Ben tells me you’ve been here for a while,” Drake said.
“Almost an hour,” Tito said. “We were the first team here. Gilberto and Roy showed up about fifteen minutes later, and the yellow boys got here a few minutes before you did.”
“And there’s no sign of the second stage?” Drake asked.
“Dude, if we found it, we wouldn’t be here now,” Gilberto said.
“Excellent point. Okay, where have you checked so far?”
“We’ve looked under every rock and bush in a forty-foot radius,” the other member of the brown team said as he approached. “I’m Roy Pace.”
Drake nodded at him, said hello, then turned in a small circle. He stepped away from the small group and surveyed the area. He noticed uncountable footprints all over the area, as well as places where people had flipped rocks and examined the bushes. Drake did his own quick circle around the area and surmised there was nothing more to see.
“Hi,” Drake said as he approached the purple team’s UTV. “Marlena?”
The woman behind the wheel smiled at him. “Close. It’s Marina.”
“Sorry. I’m horrible with names. Listen, would you mind pulling your vehicle ahead a few feet?”
Without a word, Marina started the machine, moved forward eight feet, and shut it off again, all without letting go of the bottle of water she was drinking from.
Drake examined the ground that was underneath the UTV.
“I already thought of that,” Tito said as he joined Drake. “I bent over and looked under there, but there wasn’t anything big enough to hold coordinates.”
“Did you see this?” Drake picked up a stone that was covering a small hole two inches square.
“That’s just an animal burrow. I’ve seen dozens of them over the last few days. The desert’s full of them.”
“True, but this one’s perfectly square. The burrows are round, not square.”
Tito kneeled and examined the hole closer. “Sure enough, it is.” He took the pen from his pocket and explored the hole with it. “It goes down pretty deep, too.”
Drake nodded. “I’d guess a foot or so. There was a sign here at one point.”
“Son of a gun,” Brandon said as he leaned over and looked at the hole. “I think you’re right, Drake. Someone must have pulled the sign after they got the next stage coordinates from it.”
Drake nodded. “Logical assumption.”
“I guess it’s back to town for us then,” Brandon said.
“Not necessarily. Which way did y’all come from?”
Tito, Ben, Brandon, and Marina all spoke at once, and each gave a different answer.
Drake stopped them by holding up his hand. “Better yet, each of you go find your tire tracks, about fifty or sixty feet from here.”
“How can I do that? I’m a city boy, not a tracker. Never even been in the boy scouts.” Ben said.
“Easy,” Gilberto said. “Look for the coordinates of the geocache you just came from, then walk in that direction. You’ll spot your tracks soon enough.”
“Great idea, Gilberto,” Drake said.
Ben and Tito followed Gilberto’s advice, grabbed their GPS units, and followed the arrow out into the desert. Roy and Geneva, who had both come in on a straight line, easily picked up their own tire tracks and followed them away from the site.
“That’s good,” Drake yelled once he saw everyone had found the tracks. Roy and Ben were standing about fifteen feet from each other to the northeast, Geneva was due east, and Gilberto was off on his own to the southeast. “Everyone, stay where you are.”
Noting that each of the teams were all in easterly directions, Drake walked forty feet due north, looked around to get his bearings, then strolled in a wide arc. When he reached north-northwest on the compass, he spotted a set of UTV tire treads. He walked a few more feet and discovered another set, this one wider than the first. Drake followed the second set for a few feet, and the two tracks turned into three, so he knew there were two separate UTVs that headed in that direction.
He stood where he was and whistled to get everyone’s attention, then waved everyone over. “Bring the UTVs!”
Within three minutes, the four teams gathered around him.
“The next waypoint is that way,” Drake said as he pointed behind him.
“How do you figure that?” Marina said.
“We all got here from more or less the same direction, and these tracks are too well concentrated to have come from that way. Ben, you guys follow the tracks over there, I’ll follow these tracks, and Tito, you follow that other set.”
“What about us?” Gilberto asked.
“You can follow me. If I’m right, we’ll all end up at the same place at the same time, anyway.”
Everyone got in their vehicles and started the engines, then pulled out Drake in the lead. Drake drove slowly while monitoring the trail. Like he suspected, the other teams stayed close to him. After four-tenths of a mile, all four teams lost the trail momentarily when the road went over a patch of bedrock. The whipping winds wiped the trail free of dirt and dust, but after a quick search, Gilberto found the trail again and they continued on.
Three minutes later, they spotted an arrow-shaped sign on a three-foot-high stake. Although the sign pointed to the direction from which they’d come, there were coordinates clearly displayed on the sign’s back.
From those coordinates, they easily found the next waypoint, but instead of one arrow, there were two right next to each other.
“Each one of these has numbers,” Roy said.
“Let me see,” Geneva said.
She loaded the first set of coordinates into her GPS and looked at where they were, then she repeated the process with the second set. “These are the correct coords for the next leg,” she said as she pointed to the second arrow. “The other set takes us backwards to where the second stage is.”
“So, whoever removed the sign from the initial waypoint planted it here to get us to go the wrong way?” Roy asked.
“Looks that way. Although it would only work once. When you got back here, you’d take the second set, right? At the least, you’d only lose some time,” Geneva said.
Roy reached out, grabbed the arrow with the wrong coordinates, pulled it from the ground, and threw it down. “Come on, let’s get back on the road.”
The four teams had no further issues and soon they arrived at the location for the geocache. Everyone gathered around the ammo can they plainly saw hidden beneath a pile of rocks.
“Go ahead, Drake. You stamp the log first. We wouldn’t be here without you,” Tito said.
“Um, we can’t. We don’t have the stamps.”
“What do you mean?” Ben asked.
“Geneva and I were going from cache to cache. Once we had the coordinates to the last location, we’d radio them to the other halves of our team, and they go to the final stages and stamp the logs.”
“So you’re the person who’s been calling out planets and random numbers all day? That’s pretty smart, actually,” Ben said. “How many have you found so far?”
“This is our last one,” Geneva said.
“Last one? That can’t be! We have three left!” Marina said.
“We still got two more to go,” Brandon added.
“Still, on this one, you go first,” Tito said. “Anyone here got a problem with that?”
No one said a word, so Drake radioed the final coordinates to Allie. Fifteen minutes later, they drove up.
“There’s a party, and you didn’t invite us?” Ingrid said as she left the vehicle.
“We’re just waiting for you,” Gilberto said.
Roy removed the rocks from the ammo can, took it to Ingrid’s UTV, and opened it on the hood. He dug out the log and handed it to Ingrid.
“Before you stamp that, which teams have already been here?” Drake asked.
Ingrid looked at the paper. “The orange team was first, and the pink team was second.”
Drake nodded, and Ingrid handed the paper to Allie. Allie stamped the paper, then handed it back to Ingrid, who added her mark.
“Who gets it next?” she asked.
“Purple, then brown, then us,” Ben said. “That’s only fair, to stamp it in the order the teams arrived, isn’t it?”
Everyone agreed and passed the log sheet around. Brandon was the last to stamp it, so he returned it to the ammo can and hid it under the pile of stones.
“Probably didn’t need to do that,” Drake said. “There are no other teams to sign the log.”
“What do you mean?” Brandon asked.
“There are five teams here. Two already signed, and three teams aren’t competing today.” Drake said.
“I know the red and blue folks are out, but what about the black team? They haven’t been here yet,” Marina said.
“Didn’t you hear? They were in an accident,” Drake said. “Emma and Kerry were both injured and had to be removed via an ambulance.”
“That’s horrible,” Ben said. “Are they going to be okay?”
“Don’t know. I’m sure we’ll hear more when we get back to town,” Drake said. “Speaking of which, we’re burning daylight, and I know y’all want to get on to the next one.”
“One last question,” Ben said. “Can you give us all the final coordinates to the rest of the geocaches?”
Allie laughed, then lifted her butt and sat on the geocache sheet. “Sorry. You know that’s against the rules.”
Allie got out of the gray team’s UTV, made sure she had all her stuff, and joined Drake.
“I guess we should get back to town. T.R. is going to have questions for you,” Allie said.
“I have some questions myself. Number one is, if the red team were the cheaters and Bruce kicked them out, how is it we’re still having mysterious accidents and moved stages?” Drake said.
“That’s one I’d like the answer to myself. Is there any other reason you’re in a hurry to get back?”
Drake shrugged. “Just need to prepare for a date I have tonight. I should at least shower and put on a clean shirt. But before all that, we do need to see T.R.”
