Time went really slowly after I became more alert. My shoulder was killing me and my stomach felt raw on the inside from the hunger. None of us really talked because there wasn’t anything to say. When it got dark on the third night, I said, “You guys should go down the mountain together tomorrow. I’ll stay here.”
“I’m not leaving you,” Mason said.
“I don’t think I’m strong enough to walk yet and you won’t be able to carry me.” I pointed at his knee that had swelled to the size of a watermelon.
“I’m not leaving you,” he repeated.
“Mason. Be reasonable. If you guys don’t go get help, we’re all going to die.”
Sophie didn’t say anything, but she shifted the position she was sitting in.
I could tell Mason wasn’t going to budge his opinion, so I said, “Maybe I’ll feel well enough in the morning to come with you.” Then I let it go.
Mason got up and disappeared outside the cave.
“You’ll have to go by yourself if he refuses,” I whispered to Sophie.
“I don’t know if I can do it alone.”
“You can.”
“If we stay here, someone will eventually find us.”
“We’ll need food before that happens. Mason can’t carry me and I don’t think I can make it.”
She started to cry.
“Sophie, you’re the strongest female I’ve ever met. You can do it.”
“Haven’t you known me long enough to realize that the tough-girl thing is all just a big act?”
“You can do it,” I repeated.
Mason came back into the cave. It was too dark to see him, but I felt the warmth of his body when he slid down to lie next to me. His breathing was initially shallow, then slowed and got deeper. It almost sounded as if he’d fallen asleep until something crashed through the bushes outside. Mason sat up. Sophie made a whimpering sound and scooted closer to me. We all held our breath and listened. It was moving around close to the opening of the cave.
I reached through the darkness and searched for Mason’s hand. When I found it, he tightened his fingers around mine. We sat perfectly still. I could hear a sniffing sound, sort of like what a black bear in Britannia Beach would sound like if it was searching for food. “It’s an animal. Make noise,” I said as I stood up and clapped. “Ha! Ha! Get!”
Mason stood and clapped his hands. “Yeah! Yeah!”
“What are you doing?” Sophie whimpered. “Don’t tell it we’re here.”
“It already knows. It can smell us. Ha! Get!” I stomped my feet and yelled some more. Then I listened. The bushes rustled as it ran away.
“What do you think it was?” Sophie asked, from a safe position behind Mason.
“I don’t know. It was big, though,” I said.
“It was most likely a coyote.”
“Are there still jaguars around here?”
“I don’t know. The locals have lots of legends, but it’s hard to know what’s true and what’s not. I’m sure it was just a coyote.”
“What if it comes back?” Sophie asked.
“I’ll stay awake,” Mason offered as he sat down near the opening of the cave.
“We’ll take shifts,” I said. “Wake me up when you get tired.”
In the morning, my stomach growled painfully to remind me that I hadn’t eaten in days. I should have never complained about the food at the camp. If I’d known it was the last thing I was ever going to eat, I would have tried to appreciate it a little more. There were a lot of things I would have tried to appreciate more.
I rolled over. Sophie was asleep beside me. Mason was still sitting awake near the opening. “You didn’t wake me,” I said to him.
“I didn’t get tired.” He turned his head to look at me.
I got up and rested my hand briefly on his shoulder as I passed. “I have to use the facilities. I’ll be right back.”
I wandered out of the cave on my own. My legs were still weak and my steps were pathetically unstable. After I peed, I carefully walked down the shore for a few metres, searching for berries. Trevor had taught me the difference between edible and poisonous berries at home, but I wasn’t sure if it was the same in Mexico. It didn’t matter because I didn’t find any berry bushes anyway. I considered catching a fish, and I would have, if there had been any fish in the stream. I decided that snagging a bird or a lizard would be a good option, especially if I started a fire to cook it with. Then I realized it might not be a good idea to have a fire in case the drug-cartel guys were still after us.
I crouched down at the edge of the water and put two painkillers on my tongue then cupped my hands to scoop some water into my mouth. I scooped another handful to splash over my face and I heard a noise. It sounded like something walking up behind me. I tried to spin around and stand up at the same time, but fell to my butt.
“Graceful,” Sophie snickered.
“You scared me.”
“Sorry.”
I moved to sit on a flat stone near the edge of the water. She crouched down to cup water. She drank a few handfuls, then climbed up and sat next to me on the rock. I hugged her. “I’m sorry I got us into this mess and that I haven’t been a great friend lately. I feel horrible that I didn’t know about Doug or your plans to go back to school.”
“You’re the best friend I could ask for, Deri.” She sighed and looked up at the trees. “I talked you into coming here, remember? And the reason I didn’t tell you about Doug was because I knew you would talk me out of it. The reason I didn’t tell you about wanting to be a teacher was because I knew you would talk me into it.”
“I don’t want you to avoid telling me things because you’re worried I would pressure you. I’ll support you no matter what you do or don’t want to do. It’s your life, not mine.”
After a long, heavy pause, she said, “I made a mistake with Doug.”
“You can fix it when you see him again.”
“If.”
“No. When.” I noticed she was wearing the ring Doug had given her when she graduated. “He’s going to be excited to work it out.”
“Our lives have gone in different directions. I don’t think it can work if he’s going to keep touring.”
“You didn’t even try.”
“I don’t need to try some things to know they’re going to end up a disaster.”
“You guys have something special. You shouldn’t throw it away without trying everything.”
She sighed and nodded.
I pointed at her feet. “My adorable canvas slip-ons have taken quite a beating.”
“Yeah, I owe you a new pair.” She threw stones in the stream. “Are we going to try to make it down the mountain today?”
“Yeah, I think I can do it. All we have to do is find a road or a village. I don’t think it will be that hard.”
“What if we run into the drug dealers?”
“I don’t know. We can’t stay here forever, though. We’ll need food eventually. We could risk a fire and have some barbecued snake if you want.”
“Ha. I think I’d rather starve, but ask me again tomorrow.”
I stretched my arm around her shoulders and squeezed tightly. “I’m glad you’re with me. I’m sorry I dragged you into this mess, but I wouldn’t be able to get through this if you weren’t here with me.”
She made a face and flicked my arm. “Ya, there’s no one I would rather be running for my life with than you.”
I chuckled. “Do you think your dad will let you go on vacation with me again?”
“If we don’t tell him what happened.”
“Okay. Here’s the plan, we’ll walk down to the road, hook up with a ride back to the resort, and get on a plane back to Vancouver. He won’t even know. It’s brilliant.”
“You are shot, though,” she pointed out. “Someone might ask how that happened.”
I laughed. “True.”
“I’ve got an idea. We’ll tell everyone we went snorkelling and a stingray stabbed you with its tail.”
“I like it.”
We both turned to look over our shoulders when we heard footsteps coming up behind us. “Morning, ladies,” Mason said. “Are you enjoying your Mexican vacation?”
“The bed is a little hard and the food sucks, but other than that I would give it rave revues,” I said.
He waded into the water to wash up. He dunked completely under the surface and pushed his wet hair back off his face, then stood frozen in the water and searched the sky. A second later, I heard what he heard.
“It’s a helicopter.” I pulled Mason and Sophie’s t-shirts out from under the belt tourniquet over my shoulder. “Here, tear this along the side seam.” I handed Mason his shirt. “We have to lay the fabric out on top of a tree so they can see us from the air.”
“What if it’s the cartel guys?” Mason asked.
I looked up at the sky and considered our options. “It could be one of your dad’s, or military, or even commercial. The odds are in our favour. Do you think you can climb that tree and spread the fabric over the top branches?”
“They’re circling around,” Sophie said. “They’re searching along the stream. What if it’s the cartel guys and we end up showing them exactly where we are?”
I pointed downstream about fifty metres to a group of shorter trees that weren’t as crowded by taller trees. “We have to take that chance. We’ll put the signal there. They can’t land the helicopter here anyway. They’ll have to hike in. If the cartel guys show up, we’ll see them before they see us. It will give us enough time to run and hide.”
Mason ran down the pebble shore and climbed one of the taller trees. When he got as close to the top as he could, he flung the t-shirts across the top of the branches next to him. He scanned the sky for a while, then shouted, “I think they’re going the other way.”
Sophie and I stared up at the sky as well. I couldn’t even hear the helicopter anymore. Mason started to climb down one branch at a time and when he was about ten feet off the ground, the branch he stepped on snapped. He fell the rest of the way and landed awkwardly.
“Shit,” he moaned and held his knee into his chest.
Sophie ran to him. I rushed as quickly as I could, but my legs were not cooperating and I kept stumbling. She reached him and knelt down. He groaned in pain, but it sounded as if he was trying to stifle it. I eventually got to them and helped him sit up.
“I’m okay,” he strained to say. The tendons in his neck stretched tightly and his jaw didn’t move as he spoke through clenched teeth. He sucked in a deep breath and exhaled slowly, as if he was bracing for pain.
I glanced at Sophie, concerned.
“I think the helicopter went south,” Mason said. He winced as he tried to straighten his leg. It wouldn’t extend, so he gave up trying and left it bent.
“Can you walk?”
“Yeah.” He tried to get up, but fell back on his butt.
Sophie frowned, then tilted her face up at the sky. “If he can’t walk, we’ll be stuck here.”
“I can.” He tried again and was able to get up, but not put any weight on his left leg.
“Take his other side,” I said. “We need to get him to the creek to soak his knee in the cold water.” We wedged ourselves under his armpits and he hopped back towards the cave. Even with the soaking, his knee swelled more and it turned a purplish-red colour. He acted as if it didn’t hurt, but he could barely put weight on it.
“He’s not going to be able to walk,” Sophie said.
“That helicopter is searching for us. They’ll circle around. They’ll definitely be back,” I said.
Sophie frowned. “What if we don’t want them to come back?”
“I don’t think it’s the drug-cartel guys. I’m sure they have way more important things to do than chase us through the wilderness for days and days.”
Her shoulders relaxed a little. “Yeah, I guess Mason would have to be worth a lot of dough for them to waste those kinds of resources.” She turned to face him. “Hey, Mason. Exactly how many days of searching are you worth to a Mexican drug cartel?”
He licked his lower lip and stared down at the dirt. “I’m sure they gave up after that first night.”
Sophie smiled, but I knew he was lying.
I sighed and walked over to him. “Here, take these.” I handed him the bag with the last four painkillers in it.”
He shook his head to decline. “You need those.”
“No. I don’t feel pain anymore.”
“Because you’ve been taking them.”
“Mason, we might need you to be able to walk. Please take them. I’m not going to take anymore, whether you do or not, so you might as well.”
He sighed to surrender and held his hand out. “I’ll take two. You take the other two.”
“Two won’t make any difference.” I tossed the bag into his palm, then turned to walk away.
“Four isn’t going to make any difference either,” he mumbled under his breath.
I wandered over to a tree and sat with my back against the trunk. I wanted to try to have a vision that might give me some direction or maybe warn me of danger. Nothing came to me. The only image that even flashed through my mind was from the first date I ever went on with Mason. We went to a party and it was a complete disaster. The image that was stuck in my head was a snapshot of the moment when Trevor and Mason were both staring at me, waiting for me to choose which one of them I wanted to drive me home that night.
We waited all day by the cave, taking turns, watching for a rescue team to hike in. Nobody came. We heard the helicopter two more times, but it was impossible to know if they saw the t-shirts. “We should make a signal fire while we still have daylight,” I said. “They won’t see the fabric at night. If it’s a rescue team they’ll be looking for smoke.”
“If it’s the cartel guys, they’ll be looking for smoke too,” Sophie said.
Mason’s eyebrows angled together. “What if it’s not a rescue team, Deri?”
“We don’t really have a lot of options. Either we signal aircraft hoping for the chance that they are friendly and will help us, or Sophie and I leave you here and try to get help on our own. Which do you prefer?”
Without answering, Mason stood up and hopped around to collect dry branches. Sophie helped him by taking armfuls from him and transferring them to the shore. I separated the wood into three piles for three fires because I knew it was the international distress signal. Trevor taught me it when I was only ten. He received a survival book for his twelfth birthday and made me memorize every page with him. I gathered some dry moss and found two rocks to make a spark with. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the strength to hit the rocks with the right velocity.
“Mason. I need your help.”
He took the rocks out of my hands and clapped them together repeatedly. Eventually, he generated a few sparks, but not big enough to set the moss on fire. He took a break, then tried again. “Yes,” he shouted.
I lunged forward and gently blew on the spark that had jumped from the rock into the moss. It started to smoke. Then when I blew again, it ignited into a small fire. “Good job.” I placed it onto a bigger pile of moss, blew on it again and then transferred it to light up the first pile of sticks.
“Hey, you did it,” Sophie said as she walked over to us. “Look what I found.” Mason and I both glanced over our shoulders. She was holding up a bushel of purplish coloured plants. “I think we can eat these. I saw Hector’s sisters taking some back to their hut.”
“Yeah,” Mason said and checked it out. “It’s amaranth. The locals turn the seeds into a porridge-like paste.” He looked around. “We could also eat acacia seeds if I can find some.”
I lit the other two fires with a burning branch from the first one, then I layered damp leaves on top to make it smokier. Sophie got to work rubbing the amaranth to separate the black seeds from the plant.
“Do you want to come with me to try to find an acacia tree?” Mason asked me once the fires were smoking.
“Sure. Do you want to come, Soph?”
“I’m good. I’ll keep the fire smoking and try to get enough of these to make something to eat. Just don’t wander too far.”
“How are you doing?” I asked him as we walked along the bank of the river.
“Good. It doesn’t really hurt. It just won’t bend properly.”
“No, I mean, how are you really doing?”
He looked sideways at me and sort of smiled as he shook his head. “You haven’t changed. You always did want to know how I really felt about things.”
“And?”
He inhaled heavily and stared off into the distance. “When you weren’t doing very well it reminded me of when my brother was dying. I used to have nightmares when he was sick and I’ve been having them again since we’ve been here.”
“What happens in the nightmare?”
“I’m sitting on the floor in my childhood bedroom all alone. It’s dark and there’s no furniture in the room because my family moved out and left without me. Not only is the house empty and abandoned, the neighbourhood is also deserted.” He paused and the crease between his eyebrows deepened. “When I realize that I’m all alone in the house, in the city, maybe in the world, I start to feel panicky and I can’t breathe because I don’t know what to do next. Then I wake up.”
I stared at his face for a long time, understanding exactly how he felt. “No matter what happens, I won’t leave you alone. I promise.”
He hugged me tightly into his chest and rested his chin on top of my head. After a while, I turned and pulled his arm so he would sit down with me on the grass.
“When I was delirious, I thought I saw your brother with my dad.”
“I know. I heard you talking to him.”
“Was he like you?”
Mason chuckled. “Everyone else thought we were exactly the same, but we didn’t think we were anything alike. On our tenth birthday, our parents threw a huge party at the country club. My dad knew a guy who worked with the Toronto Maple Leafs and he gave us authentic game jerseys. We were both really excited and we put them on as soon as we opened the boxes. We wanted to know what we looked like in them, so we asked a waitress where the nearest mirror was. She laughed and told us to just look at each other if we wanted to know what we looked like in the mirror. I turned to face Cody. I thought she was a complete idiot because all I could see was how he looked in the jersey. He was the only person who saw me as Mason.”
“I see you as Mason.”
He smiled. “I know. That’s why I can’t stand the thought of losing you too. Seeing you sitting in that bar in Acapulco seriously took my breath away. All of my old feelings came flooding back as if they had never been gone.” He tucked my hair behind my ear and looked into my eyes. “When I saw that you were wearing the necklace I gave you, I wondered if maybe my dreams were coming true and I was getting my second chance with you. Then you told me you and Trevor were still together. It felt like a steel blade went through my chest and stopped my heart dead.”
I closed my eyes, trying to stave off the guilt. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m the one who’s sorry.” He choked up and had to pause before he continued. “I have never felt worse than how I felt when I saw that you had been shot. I wouldn’t be able to live with the guilt if anything happened to you. I’m sorry that I didn’t protect you. I know Trevor would have kept you safe.”
“I wouldn’t be alive right now if you hadn’t carried me all night.”
“You wouldn’t have been shot if I hadn’t brought you here in the first place.”
“I came here of my own free will. I’m the one who blew you’re cover. Stop trying to take all the blame.”
“Derian, you and Sophie would have never been in danger if it wasn’t for me.”
“Stop. Blaming ourselves isn’t helping. We’re going to make it out of this just fine. We’re going to be able to look back at this and tell stories about the time we were hunted by a Mexican drug cartel. Trust me. No one will believe us, but we’ll be able to tell the story.”
He nodded and took a deep breath. “I just don’t want to lose you,” he whispered.
“You won’t.”
He hesitated for a long time then said, “Whether we make it out of here or not, I’m going to lose you.”
I knew he was talking about me going back to Trevor if we survived. I hated how I felt in that moment. The thought of him being hurt again on top of everything else broke my heart. I wanted to say something that would make the pain on his face disappear, but I didn’t know where to even start.
Eventually, he stood and held his hand out for me to join him. “Come on. Let’s go find some food before it gets dark.”
We didn’t talk as we searched for an acacia tree. We couldn’t find one nearby and we didn’t want to wander too far away from Sophie, so we headed back. She was crouched next to the fire using a stick to stir a tiny bit of paste on a concave rock that she was using like a bowl. When she saw us, she hopped up and smiled. “Feel like some dinner?”
We both wandered over and dipped our finger into the paste. It actually tasted not bad, but there wasn’t enough to actually satisfy any hunger. “It’s really good,” Mason said as he sat down near the stream.
“I can make more tomorrow,” she said as she swiped her finger over the rock and licked up the last of it.
Something moved in the bushes across the stream. I tensed and turned to see if Mason heard it too. His jaw muscle twitched as he stared across the water in the direction that I’d heard the noise come from. He sprung to his feet and tugged Sophie’s arm. “Get to the cave.” The bush crashed as if something very large or something in large numbers, was coming towards us. We reached the base of the boulders and scrambled towards the opening of the cave. Men’s voices shouted at us to stop. We were spotted.