“CIA,” coughs Troy, earning a swift glare from Dave.
“Which means: when the time comes, and you go into the field to take your target out and you mess up, no one is coming to save you. No agency will claim you. You get caught, your prisons will report you as fugitives. To every authority outside this camp, you are just a Class A, doing what Class As do best. And the sentences on Class As are getting tougher every day.”
He points up to the obstacle course.
“That’s why all our lessons are based on learning general skills you can improvise with out in the field. We are training you to take care of yourselves. Because out in the real world, much like out on that obstacle course, there is no safety net.”
Wait, what? No safety net?!
“What did we come to camp to learn?” he yells.
“How to not get caught!” they yell back.
“What did we come to camp to learn?” he hollers right at me.
“How to not get caught!” I join in.
“All right! So! Pretty simple!” Dave continues briskly. “You’re gonna go straight through the course, one obstacle after the next, fast as you can. When the first person gets all the way through, they turn around and chase the person who finishes after them. You catch the person behind you, you’re done! Sit down and relax. But if they make it past you to the tree line, you have to go through again. Easy, right?”
The way the others laugh at this chills me. I never played a sport in school. I ditched gym whenever possible. Apparently, I chose wrong.
“What about the last person?” I ask.
“Last one automatically has to go again,” Dennis tells me, with a look on his face that speaks of bitter experience.
“On your mark!” Dave yells. “Get set. Go!”
We sprint forward and I learn how to climb chain link by watching Erik and Javier shoot ahead. (Throw your hands up as far as you can, hitch your foot up high, keep your knees locked at the top, and throw yourself down.) I’m winded by the third fence, and when I jump down I land in knee-deep, ice-cold mud.
“Effing GROSS!” Jada groans, landing with a squelch behind me. Nobody slogs past us and grapples up the grid of rope ladders toward the big square hole in the plywood wall. I chase after her, but when I scramble through there’s another plywood wall beyond it, with its own square window, placed even higher.
It has to be twenty feet off the ground.
Connecting the two windows is a narrow rope ladder that looks like a faulty bridge from an Indiana Jones movie. Below, just like Dave warned, is nothing but the ground, a plot of cold mud. The rope ladder creaks back and forth in the morning breeze.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I mutter, climbing out onto the first few rungs.
“Yo! Passing from behind!” someone calls.
And whoever is behind me proceeds to flip the ladder over. The black earth and white sky trade places as a roller-coaster scream tears out of me and suddenly I’m hanging upside down, the weight of my entire body pulling at my slippery hands and feet, as Kurt literally climbs over me. Once his weight shifts off the ladder, sky and earth blur as the ladder spins, then swings sickeningly back and forth, left and right, again and again, my cold clenched hands going needles-and-pins numb before it finally settles.
Head down, I creep across the ladder to the second square window and get a leg through, clutching the wall so hard the plywood buckles in time with me. A length of rope hangs down below the second window and I watch as Kurt finishes rappelling down to the ground, with no harness.
“You can do this. You can do this. Get your feet flat on the wall,” I tell myself out loud, as if I’m some reality show contestant on TV. I grab the rope and back out over an almost two-story drop.
But this isn’t TV. This is me, a bag of meat, and gravity. I immediately slide down the rope. I have to clench my fists so hard the skin flays off my palms to grind to a halt, five feet from impact. When my raw fingers release the coarse rope, I drop hard into cold thick mud.
Three lanes of the same freezing wet dirt zigzag under a low grid of barbed wire. Getting on my hands and knees isn’t low enough, I have to sink to my belly, head down, face practically in the muck, to keep the wire from snagging my hair. At least there’s no way to fall. When I finally slog through to the end of the barbed wire run and heave myself back to standing, I’m soaked through and shivering hard.
And what’s waiting in front of me is … an apartment building? No. What?
I stagger closer. It’s yet another climbing wall, but dressed like a building: the detailed façade includes vinyl siding, a door, and three pairs of window frames nailed to the plywood. There’s muddy tracks, but no rope or ladder. How are we supposed to get up there?
Dennis shoots in front of me and throws himself at the door, grabbing the white lintel of the doorframe, one of his sneakers landing on the doorknob.
We’re supposed to free-climb up a thirty-foot tall fake building?
“MOVE, SIGNAL! YOU’RE IN LAST PLACE!!” Dave shrieks right in my ear, and I turn on him, wet, freezing, and as angry as I’ve ever been in my life.
“I can’t!” I blurt and Dave’s whistle drops from his mouth. “I’ll fall, okay? I can’t climb anymore. I am physically exhausted.”
Behind Dave, from the campers who’ve finished, I hear a low: “Ooooooh.”
“And how,” Dave says after a long silence, “do you think you’re going to feel after you murder and dispose of an adult body, Signal?!” He pushes his face close to mine, eyes unnaturally wide. “You think you’re going to be refreshed, Signal? No. You’re going to be ‘physically exhausted.’ You can’t clear a scene, you get caught. You get caught, you fry. Or hang. Or get a lethal injection. Or you learn how to MOVE YOUR ASS AND CLEAR THE COURSE.”
There’s a faint giggle from behind him and my face burns.
“Get back on your mark. You’re running again. All the way this time.”
No.
“Erik! Jada! Kurt! On your mark!” Dave snarls, and blows on his whistle, high and shrill.
“Last place, huh?” Erik calls, beating me to the starting line, his hair and the whole side of his head (including one of his dimples) plastered with mud. “I was first, you know. But Javier was second and got past me.”
“Yeah? Cool story. Hey—” I tap my cheek. “You got a little something on your face.”
Javier jogs toward us, and lands on the other side of me.
“Why are you running again?” Erik calls over to him.
“Extra credit,” Javier shrugs. “What, you nervous I’ll outrun you again? Because you should be.”
“On your mark!” Dave yells. “Get set! GO!”
The first run of the obstacle course was the most grueling physical ordeal of my life. The second time is infinitely worse. Because now I know what’s waiting at the end.
When I get to the fake apartment building, Jada’s still rappelling down the wall and Erik is halfway up the apartment façade, climbing up the drainpipe. I guess Javier got through first. Kurt flies past me and I lurch after him, trembling with exhaustion.
I leap for the lintel and hoist one foot up onto the doorknob, throw my arms up for the windowsill and dig my fluttering fingertips into its ledge. My vision narrows as I try to pull myself up. I can’t, my arms won’t respond, I can’t—