Jordan staggered and put her hands on her knees, letting her head hang forward. She swayed, her blond hair curtaining her face, so that Camilla couldn’t see her expression. But she looked like she was about to throw up or pass out.
Concerned, Camilla rushed forward, but before she could get there, Jordan stood up straight again. Flipping her hair back from her face, she glanced back toward the battling alpha bulls a hundred feet behind her, then walked toward Camilla with her usual cocktail-party poise and grace.
A deep male voice interrupted before Camilla could say anything to her.
“Of all the stupid things I’ve seen people do to land themselves in the ER,” Brent shouted, jogging toward them, “that had to be the dumbest—”
“Brent, she’s
hungry
.” Veronica stopped Brent with a light touch on his elbow. “Don’t forget how young she is.”
Veronica’s pale blue eyes swept over Camilla, and her mouth pulled into a grim line.
But you should know better,
her eyes said. Putting an arm around Jordan, she walked her away.
Camilla’s throat tightened, and she stared after Veronica in surprise.
H
olding the ten-foot spar like a spear, JT fished with it for the crate’s handle. Tension thrummed through his legs and arm muscles. His gaze flicked back and forth between the carabiner at the end of the spar and the sand dune the bull elephant seal had disappeared behind. The snorts, roars, and slaps of a titanic battle rose from beyond the dune. It wasn’t hard to guess what Jordan had done. JT didn’t know many Marines with the guts to try something that crazy.
The carabiner’s gate kept sliding past the handle of the crate without opening deeply enough to catch, and Juan’s steadying hand at the back of the spar wasn’t much help. Sweat dripped down JT’s cheeks. Swearing, he wiped his face with the crook of his elbow and tried again.
“Come on, come on, come on,” Lauren’s urgent monotone grated in his ears. Bouncing up and down on his left, her ponytail swinging, she looked ready to run at the first sign of the monster seal. On his right, Mason stood calm and steady. Even without looking at his face, JT was certain he was grinning.
Something seriously wrong with that guy.
And this fishing bullshit wasn’t working.
“Hell with it.” Sliding his hand loosely along the spar, JT ran forward until his fist closed around the D-ring at the end. Dropping to a crouch directly in front of the crate, he reached for the handle. The noises from behind the dune suddenly changed, growing louder.
“It’s coming back!” Lauren screamed.
The elephant seal bull burst over the dune, fifteen feet away, humping toward him with blood streaming from its chest and flanks. Gritting his teeth, he reached forward to clip the carabiner to the crate’s handle, but he was jerked up and away by a hand on his biceps. Juan pulled him to his feet, and together they stumbled backward.
The elephant seal didn’t even slow. Chest held high, it charged them, shaking its great, ugly head from side to side. Its trunk rippled back, pink gums with three-inch yellow teeth yawning wide above JT’s head.
Shoving Juan one-handed, JT thrust him out of the seal’s path. With his other hand, he raised the steel spar like a lance.
The elephant seal lowered its head, then snapped its neck upward, sending the spar flying end over end through the air. Knocked backward, JT landed on his butt in the sand. He looked up to see a monster the size of a deuce-and-a-half truck dropping forward onto him. Game over, now—he was fucking dead.
A sharp hissing noise came from behind him, and the air filled with a cloud of orange-red fog. Stepping forward over JT’s legs, Mason aimed the black canister of bear spray up into the monster’s face.
Recoiling, the elephant seal curled backward over itself and ground its face into the sand. A tail flipper the size of a car door caught Mason broadside, sending him flying. The seal’s roars turned to high deafening squeals and it retreated over the dune again, heading toward the water.
A wisp of orange-red mist from the cloud of bear spray settled over JT, and needles jabbed his eyes and the inside of his nose. Gagging and wheezing, he slapped his palms over his face. Agony blanketed his head—like getting stung by hundreds of wasps at once. Fire burned his cheeks and powdered glass shredded his mouth and throat.
Something cool splashed in his face. Water. Through a blurry red haze, he saw Juan swinging the jug of water toward him again.
“Thanks,” he croaked, and a fit of coughing racked his chest. Juan pulled him to his feet and walked over to Mason, who lay facedown on the sand nearby.
Shaking his head to clear it, JT retrieved the spar. He clipped the carabiner D-ring through the handle of the crate and looked about him with watering eyes.
Mason was standing now, brushing the sand off his clothes and rubbing his shoulder. Juan scooped Mason’s glasses out of the sand and handed them to him. Putting them on, Mason grinned at JT.
Something
really
wrong with that guy.
JT rubbed at his eyes. Now, where was Lauren? Spotting her about fifty feet away, he clenched his jaw in anger. She had run. Again.
From the other side of the dune, the monster’s receding squeals were drowned out by the angry roars of another elephant seal. The sounds of a fight erupted once again.
The crate temporarily forgotten, JT ran up to the crest of the dune, with the others right behind him.
It was ugly. Blinded by the bear spray, the retreating bull was no match for its rival.
Sinking teeth into the blinded seal’s neck, the challenger ripped back and forth with animal fury, sending blood pouring from gashes in the other’s throat.
The vanquished bull sank to the sand as the victor threw its head back, rumbling its roars of triumph across the beach.
JT glanced at the other contestants, standing in a small group at the crest of a nearby dune. Camilla looked pale. She met his gaze and turned away. Brent’s face was red. Biting a thumbnail, Jordan stared at the dead seal, unable to tear her eyes away.
Other large elephant seals shuffled in the haze. The natural order had been disrupted, and soon they would be challenging each other for the dead bull’s territory and harem, JT knew. He rubbed his eyes again, and walked back toward the crate. Everybody followed. Nobody said anything.
The animals on the beach gave the dead elephant seal a wide berth.
It lay there silent and unmoving, a huge black mound rising from an empty circle of brown sand.
T
he crate was a large cube, four feet on a side, made of high-impact olive-hued plastic. Camilla could see a big white sticker on the lid: an hourglass, surrounded by the outlines of fish, grapes, flowers, and beef carcasses. The word “
PERISHABLE
,” in boldface at the bottom of the sticker, made interpreting the symbols unnecessary—it pretty much had to be food. Camilla looked at Jordan, relieved on her behalf.
Kneeling in front of the crate next to JT, Jordan wore an expression of hungry anticipation. She rubbed her palms down her stomach, like she was smoothing the front of a wrinkled dress.
Staring a warning at the others, JT used his handheld scanner to read the tag on the crate. No one challenged him. Over his shoulder, Camilla read twenty points off the scanner’s display. Snapping open the latches, he lifted the lid of the crate.
Jordan’s eyes grew huge.
Hundreds of brick-size packages, individually wrapped in brown plastic, were stacked in neat rows inside the crate. JT laughed and pulled one out, tossing it to her.
“MREs,” he said. “Meals Ready to Eat. ‘Meals Rejected by the Enemy,’ we used to call ‘em. Taste like shit, but they’ll keep us alive.”
Camilla reached in and grabbed a package: Thai-style chicken. Flipping it over, she read the small print on the back, afraid of what she would find.
Beside her, Jordan tore open her own MRE.
Camilla grabbed her wrist, stopping her. Turning the open foil package in Jordan’s hand, she pointed at the fine black print. The fifth ingredient, after water, chicken, mushrooms, and food starch, was peanut oil.
“Oh my god.” Jordan dropped the package onto the sand. She pawed through the crate, flipping over packets, reading the backs, and tossing them aside.
“No. No. Shit. Shit. No. Oh my god.” Her voice cracked.
Camilla put a hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off. Digging to the bottom of the crate, she pulled out a package and read the back. She flung it away and stood up. Her mouth opened, but there was no sound. Raising an arm, she wrapped the crook of her elbow around her mouth, and her eyes widened even further.
“We’ll figure something out,” Camilla said to her. “I’m so sorry.”
Jordan let out a strangled cry and shook her head. Then she turned and ran south along the beach, her receding sobs echoing off the bluffs.
“Someone should go after her,” Veronica said. “After what we saw from her earlier, there’s no telling what she might do now.”
Camilla started forward.
“Not you,” Veronica snapped, freezing her in place. “You
encouraged
her. You almost got her killed.”
I did?
Camilla just stared, too stunned to answer.
“We’re going to have a talk about this later, young lady.” Veronica’s eyes bored into her, shrinking her like a naughty child. “Did you even bother to see what condition her feet are in?”
“Veronica, that’s enough,” Brent said. Then he turned to Juan, leaning against the bluff nearby with his caches piled next to his boots. “Give me that first-aid kit. Right now. No more stupid games.”
Juan shrugged and handed it over without a word.
Brent jogged up the beach toward where Jordan had disappeared.
B
rent found Jordan sitting at the foot of the wooden steps that connected the elevated beach walkway to the bluff. Sitting with her chin on knees, her arms wrapped tight around her shins, she stared across the channel at the mainland. It was quiet; the only sounds were the soft whoosh of the surf and the lonely call of the occasional seagull.
She didn’t look up as he approached. He knelt down next to her, laying the first-aid kit flat on the ground.
“We need to do something about those feet,” he said. “They’re going to get infected.”
He lifted one of Jordan’s feet by the heel. It was covered with sand, seal filth, and guano, and blood welled from cuts and abrasions on her toes. A skin avulsion marred the arch of her foot, where a half-inch flap of skin had torn loose and folded back.
Opening the first-aid kit, he set to work cleaning and dressing her injuries.
Jordan’s vacant expression was a look that Brent had seen often enough in ERs, on the faces of patients in traumatic shock. She didn’t even flinch as he swabbed the blood and dirt away from a deep cut in her sole and applied a dab of neomycin/polymyxin-B ointment.
“You’ll get through this,” he said. “Think of something happy.”
Raising a hand to bite at her thumbnail, Jordan continued to stare across the water.
Working on her foot, Brent studied her face with his peripheral vision. “Surely a lovely young woman like you has someone waiting for them at home,” he asked. “Married?”
“No.” A faint smile appeared on her lips, but her eyes were still fixed on the mainland.
“Fiancé? Boyfriend?”
“I was engaged for a while.” She looked at her nails, then dropped her hand.
“Lucky young man.” Brent wrapped a length of elastic bandage around her heel and arch. “He must have thought the world of you.”
“I suppose. But we grew apart.”
“It happens,” he said. “I know a little bit about that, myself.”
“So what’s there to say, really?”
He started working on her other foot. “There must’ve been some good times, though. Tell me about one of those.”
“We were at Stanford together. He was premed, and I was majoring in communications, so we both studied all the time, but every Friday we’d go to this Mexican place on University Avenue, a whole group of us. They made great margaritas there. Then afterwards we’d all end up at Nola’s—a crazy New Orleans bar kind of place—or we’d head up to the city and hit a few clubs.”
“Sounds like you two really had something special,” Brent said.
She gave him a sharp glance, then looked away again.
“Are you still in touch?” he asked.
“No, he passed away. It was very sad.”
“I’m sorry, I guess I’m not doing a very good job of cheering you up. I’ll shut up.”
“That’s okay. At least it’s taking my mind off being hungry.” She raised her thumb to bite at the nail again. “Besides, we’d already broken up by then. This guy… well, we weren’t really right for each other. You know how it is, one of those mistakes you make when you’re young. I had moved on. He needed to.”
“You probably broke his heart,” Brent said.
“Hey, I thought you were trying to cheer me up.” Jordan pulled her foot away and stood up.
“Sorry. Let’s change the subject, then. I’m not too happy about what you did back there, risking your life like that.”
“Whatever.”
Turning away, she padded up the steps without a backward glance.
“O
ur rooms don’t have doors,” Camilla said. “How will you keep the rest of the water safe?”
“Here’s a pen,” Mason said. “Put your initials on your jug, and mark the water level.”
He hadn’t really answered her question. Camilla looked at the armful of MREs she held—Mason’s share of the food from the crate—and tumbled the packages down onto his cot. Warm amber light bathed the drying wood walls of his room and glowed from the remaining wet spots on the bare floorboards of the upstairs hallway. Outside the window, the sun was setting. Shadows stretched across the narrow yard in front of the two houses. The air was turning chilly.
Camilla had stashed her own MREs and caches in her room already. If she rationed herself, the food supply wouldn’t be a problem. Vita Brevis giving them enough food made sense to her; as a mountain biker, she knew what a difference a mid-ride energy bar made. Too little to eat now would leave the contestants lethargic—and in the end, this was about entertainment, wasn’t it? She looked around at the walls, wondering which knotholes and cracks hid cameras. Watching people with no energy lie around would make for a boring show, and she figured Julian knew it.