New Year Island (13 page)

Julian’s on-screen gaze moved purposefully around the room, from person to person. “Choose your teams. Clear the buildings. Go!” The monitor went blank.

Camilla grinned at the blank screen. She already had her team—they were standing all around her. She nudged Jordan. “Come on, what are we waiting for?”

On the other side of the room, Lauren grabbed JT and Juan by the arm. “You guys are with me… and you, too, Travis, and…” She looked at Camilla’s group, then at Natalie, standing against the wall alone.

Lauren’s eyes slitted. “No, I don’t
think so
…”

Jordan laughed—her usual giggle of can-you-believe-this amusement—but under the circumstances, it seemed a little cruel.

A digital scoreboard appeared on the screen: a grid of ten square cells, each labeled with a contestant’s name, the five squares across the top and bottom outlined in different colors. Lauren’s red team ran across the top, and Jordan’s blue team across the bottom.

Natalie had been assigned to the red team.

“Shit.” Lauren turned away.

Travis stared at Camilla across the room. “Looks like us blue-collar folks against you white-collar types. Guess y’all are most comfortable with your own kind.”

Let’s go, guys.” Jordan pointed through the archway. “Next door.”

Camilla hustled after Jordan and crossed into the Greek Revival house next door, followed by Mason, Veronica, and Brent. Her feet slid in the muck that coated the floorboards.

Through the doorway behind them, Lauren shouted instructions. “JT, Juan, head upstairs and send ‘em down. Travis and I’ll shoo ‘em out.”

A goose-size black bird with an iridescent blue eye flapped up from the floor in a loud whir of wings and struck the side of Camilla’s face, brushing her lips. She coughed and spat out a feather, tasting fishy, oily nastiness. Then she started laughing. She couldn’t help herself.

Her teammates looked crazy, waving their arms and yelling, trying to shoo seals toward the open doorways. The seals seemed to be getting into the spirit of it, too. They leaped and yelped around the contestants, like eager dogs begging their owners to play. Camilla chased a seal out and went after another.

“There’s another monitor in here!” Veronica yelled from deeper inside the house. “Another scoreboard.” Her voice turned harsh. “The red team is beating us.”

Camilla ran to find Veronica and the monitor in the second house’s large living room. Jordan burst in through another doorway, a juvenile seal cradled gently in her arms.

“That’s not smart,” Veronica said. “It’s got diseases. You don’t want to get bitten.”

“You wouldn’t do that, would you?” Jordan stroked the seal’s soft back. It looked up at her with round, curious eyes.

She stepped out of the room for a moment to set the seal gently on the ground outside. On the monitor, her score changed from 4 to 5. Then she was back. “Okay, guys, we are not going to lose. We need ideas, quickly. Camilla?”

“Think of this like soccer.” Camilla looked at her teammates. “We’re only covering half the field. We need to play some defense, too.”

Mason laughed. “Brilliant. And sneaky. Let’s do it.”

Brent stood with his hands in his vest pockets, not saying anything. Did he disapprove of her idea?

Veronica shook her head. “I certainly don’t think—”

“I like it!” Jordan said, clapping her hands with glee. She pointed at Mason and Veronica. “You guys, go. You know what to do. With my shoe situation, I’d be useless.”

The two of them nodded and pelted out the door.

Camilla watched them go. Now that Jordan liked the idea, Veronica was a big fan, too, all of a sudden? But then, this was why Camilla had wanted Jordan as the team leader. She had seen the way Jordan could take over just by walking into a room.

Jordan wobbled on a broken shoe and grabbed the wall, smiling at Camilla. “You and Brent head upstairs,” she said. “I’ll clear the rest down here.”

Nodding, Camilla thought of Avery and how despondent he had sounded yesterday. She had left him to come here so she could help
all
her kids. But even if she could outsmart the other contestants, how could she possibly beat Jordan?

L
auren windmilled her arms and chased another seal out the door. Passing through the central room, she glanced at the scoreboard.

She smirked—she was killing them. Thumping noises came from upstairs, along with cursing and the barks of distressed seals. Juan and JT had chased five or six of the slippery, stinky animals down the stairs for her to shoo out, but they didn’t seem to be having much luck with the last few.

“What are you clowns doing up there?” she shouted. She was eager to finish and wipe that smile off Jordan’s face. Would the losing team have to pick someone to send home? Julian hadn’t said anything about that.

Juan skidded down the stairs behind his last seal. “You need to let JT and me up front now,” he said, pointing at the scoreboard. “So far, we’ve been taking one for the team while you rack up points.”

“You’ll get your twenty when our team wins.”

“What?” JT slid down the stairs to stare at her. “Fuck that, Lauren. We need to start scoring
now
.”

“Fine. Be my guest.” She looked around. Hadn’t she cleared this room already? For some reason, it seemed to be full of seals again.

She chased one toward a doorway and bumped into JT, who was driving his seal the same direction. Both their seals escaped back into the house.

“God damn it, girl,” JT said, “you need to back the fuck off.”

She stepped up and pushed JT. “Listen, cowboy, nobody—”

“Hey!” Travis’s shout echoed from the other side of the building. “Get over here. These sons-a-bitches are cheating.”

Lauren plunged through the house to find Travis, silhouetted in an open doorway to the outside. He had his arms braced against the jambs and his knees wide to block access, but the room was already full of seals.

“Where the hell were you?” he shouted. “Not much use now.”

From over his shoulder, Lauren spotted Mason and Veronica outside, herding a big crowd of seals in front of them. Waddling across the open ground and waving their arms, they drove the seals toward the doorways Travis wasn’t covering. A riot of slippery black and gray shapes spilled into the room.

“You gotta be shitting me,” Lauren said, and rushed to intercept. Through the empty frame of a window, Mason laughed at her.

Juan jammed a jagged hunk of plywood across a doorway, and JT tried to cover the other side, but there were too many openings.

Lauren couldn’t see the scoreboard. Was the blue team catching up?

“You two!” she yelled. “Go do the same thing to their house.”

“Hell with that.” JT nudged a seal back out with his knee. “I need points.”

“God
damn
it.” She slapped the doorframe. “Where the hell’s Natalie?”

Cheering erupted outside, and her chest tightened.

She looked at Juan. He slowly shook his head at her. How could he act so calm about it? They had just lost. She slammed a fist into the wall and stepped outside. Her team joined her to stand in silence, watching the other team celebrate.

“Awesome! Go, blue team!” Jordan jumped around outside the other building like an excited schoolgirl. She hugged Mason and Veronica, welcoming them back. “My heroes! You guys won it for us.”

Lauren’s hands balled into fists. Beaten by a fucking
cheerleader
. She had to look away. To her surprise, she saw Natalie shoo a seal out of their building. And another.

“Real nice,” Lauren said. “Scoring yourself some points?” She crossed her arms. “You’re pretty useless, you know that, Natalie? You let us down big-time.”

Juan shook his head again. “She’s not why we lost.”

Natalie give him a grateful glance, and Lauren turned away in disgust.

Mason waved at the red team from fifty feet away, surrounded by his own happy blue teammates.

“Look at that,” JT’s jaw clenched. “Motherfucker’s laughing at us.”

“Let him enjoy it.” Travis stared at Mason with cold eyes, rubbing the triangle of beard under his lip. “Payback’s a bitch.”

“Y
ou look ridiculous.” Veronica laughed—that unexpected sexy purr again.

Camilla looked down at herself. Her white shirt was now mostly brown, with smears of gray she didn’t want to think too hard about. Her jeans were so caked with mud and seal crap, she couldn’t tell they were once blue. She smelled like a zoo.

Jordan put an arm around her. “We all look ridiculous,” she said. “But we won.”

Their blue team had gathered in the central room of the Victorian house again. Matted hair stuck to Camilla’s cheeks, crusted with mud and stuff she didn’t want to think about. She rubbed her face, and her hand came away coated with brown grime. She needed to get cleaned up—she must look like a cartoon street urchin. She eyed Jordan, who looked like she had just stepped off the pages of a magazine. How had she stayed so clean? Except for her shoes, which were a disaster—pretty much falling apart.

“Julian and the crew are in those other warehouse buildings,” Camilla said. “Hopefully they’ve got some showers over there.”

“And some lunch,” Jordan said. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m hungry.”

“Aren’t you both forgetting something?” Mason said. “One-hundred-percent authenticity, remember?”

“What are you saying?” Veronica stared at him. “You don’t think they plan to feed us? They’ll just leave us rolling around in the mud here like…”—she indicated Camilla with a manicured fingernail—”…dirty animals?”

“I assume the ship will pick us again.” Brent put his hands in his vest pockets and leaned back, scratching his spine against the wall like a big old bear against a tree trunk. “Otherwise, where are we going to sleep?”

Camilla looked up as Lauren’s red team filed in to take their places against the opposite wall. They were quiet. Too quiet, she thought. Their resentful stares cut across the room.

Her eyes sought out Juan. Unlike the others, he didn’t look resentful. Just thoughtful. He slouched against a wall with his hands in his pockets, like a teenage slacker. She smiled, picturing irritated teachers telling a younger Juan to stand up straight and pay attention.

The scoreboard flashed once. Their scores stared out at them:

A pulsing blue frame, labeled “Winning Team,” appeared around the bottom row of the scoreboard. The blue team’s scores spun upward by twenty points.