And Then What?

by D. R. Graham

  When we were ready to head out, Murphy and Trevor made Sophie and me put on their bulletproof vests.

  “I would actually be more comfortable if you were wearing this since I can guarantee you will jump in front of any bullet that’s coming at me,” I said to Trevor.

  “Don’t bother arguing,” he said as he tightened the Velcro.

  The guards walked behind us. I felt sick almost immediately after we started hiking on an incline. It was hard to tell if it was because I couldn’t handle the physical exertion, if I was anxious about running into cartel guys, or if I was upset about Mason leaving. Maybe all three. Hector walked in the lead because he knew the way, but I was uncomfortable with him being the first line of defence, so I yelled ahead, “Hector, please walk behind Murphy and tell him which way to go.”

  “It is better to showing the way,” he protested.

  “I know, but it will help you practice your English if you give directions.”

  “The people won’t know that I am the best at saving if I am not in the first.”

  “You can be at the front when we get close to the village. How’s that?”

  His shoulders collapsed and he threw his head back in an exaggerated gesture of disappointment before he stepped aside to let Murphy pass him. He shot me a look of exasperation before falling back into line behind Murphy.

  “Gracias Hector,” I called.

  The forest looked different in the day. It was actually very beautiful and I was glad to have a new memory to replace the traumatic images from the night we were chased. We paused every so often to drink and let me rest. After several hours of hiking, we stopped to have lunch.

  “Do you think that John guy will be able to figure out the way to the village?” I asked Trevor.

  He shrugged. “He was a Marine. I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.”

  “It’s my fault he left. I shouldn’t have been affectionate with you in front of him.”

  “I’m your boyfriend, Deri. He needs to get over it.”

  “Well, wandering off in the middle of the night was a stupid way to try to get over it.”

  Trevor smiled and bit into an apple. “You said it, not me.”

  Murphy sat beside me and checked the dressing on my bullet wound. “Mason won’t be able to walk that fast with his mangled knee. We’ll probably catch up to them this afternoon.”

  “You think?”

  “Yup.”

  I smiled and felt energized at the thought of being able to catch up to them. “Okay, let’s get going.” I stood and clapped my hands.

  “I’m not finished eating,” Trevor said.

  “Eat while you walk.” I pulled his hand to make him stand up.

  Sophie groaned, then pushed herself off the log to follow me. “I am so going to go to the spa when we get back.”

  I looked over my shoulder and smiled. “Then maybe you should fly to Europe and meet up with Doug on tour.”

  “He probably doesn’t want me to.”

  “I’m sure he’s worried.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s going to make me cry.”

  I slowed down and wrapped my arm around her shoulder. “I like it when you cry.”

  “I don’t.”

  We walked for hours and didn’t catch up to Mason and John. It was late afternoon when we reached the base of the waterfall that Sophie, Mason, and I had jumped from. Sophie and I stopped and looked up.

  “You made me jump from that!” Sophie exclaimed.

  “I saw it in a vision. I knew it would be okay. Sort of.”

  “Sort of? Remind me not to listen to you in the future.”

  “We survived.”

  “Hey, Trevor, take our picture. I want to show Doug what we did.”

  Trevor pulled out his phone and turned it on to snap a photo of us standing with the waterfall in the background.

  “Too bad Mason isn’t here,” Sophie said. “He should be in the picture too.”

  It made me feel really sad when she said that. My stomach cramped up and I had to hold my side. I stood buckled over for a few seconds.

  “You okay?” Trevor asked.

  Tears rolled down my cheeks, but I nodded.

  “Do you want me to give you a piggy-back ride for a while?”

  I thought about how Mason had carried me the entire distance that we had already come. I felt horrible that he had to carry me so far when he was sick and shot. “No,” I answered absently. I just wanted to get going again so I could see Mason and make sure he was all right.

  The sun had sunk low in the sky when Hector finally said we were close. He sprinted around Murphy to take the lead. When we reached the edge of the forest and entered a clearing where villagers could see him, Hector stood up tall and puffed his chest out. “Hola!” he shouted and threw his arms in the air so everyone would notice him leading us back to safety.

  A bunch of people rushed towards us and patted Hector on the back. Murphy lifted Hector up on his shoulders to give him a hero’s ride. I walked over to a guy who was obviously a guard and asked, “Is Mr. Cartwright here?”

  He pointed to a group of men standing near a building in the middle of the clearing. It wasn’t Mason. It was his dad. He looked up from the device he had in his hand. He smiled and excused himself from the group before walking over to me. “Derian. Thank God.” He hugged me. “I’m very sorry you got mixed up in this. How are you doing?”

  “Okay, I guess. Where’s Mason?”

  “What do you mean? Isn’t he with you?” He looked behind me, searching for Mason.

  “No. He left before us with one of the guards. He should be here already.” I left Mr. Cartwright and ran back to Trevor. “Mason hasn’t made it back yet.”

  Trevor and Murphy exchanged one of their looks.

  “It’s going to get dark soon.” The tone of my voice rose with my panic. “What if they got lost?”

  “Maybe they went to the other village,” Trevor said calmly.

  Mr. Cartwright had followed me and stood next to Murphy. “Is it safe at the other village?” I asked him.

  “No.” He shook his head. “We were able to get security in to evacuate the volunteers, but the cartel men are still in the area somewhere. I’ve pulled everyone out of the project. Only locals and a few people from the medical team are still there.”

  “Can we contact them to see if Mason is there?”

  “I’ll try.” He walked away and talked with a guard.

  Trevor wrapped his arms around me and whispered, “He’s fine.”

  “You don’t know that.” I started to hyperventilate.

  A few minutes later, Mason’s dad came back and shook his head. “We can’t make contact right now in case the lines are being monitored.”

  “Would it be possible for us to take a helicopter there? We can check if Mason’s there and return Hector to his family,” I proposed.

  “Hector?”

  “He’s one of the kid’s Mason has been helping. He found us in the forest and led us here.” I directed Mr. Cartwright to where Hector was telling stories to some local boys. “Hector, I would like you to meet Señor Murray’s father.”

  “Hola Señor Murray. I am crazy brave.”

  “So I’ve heard. Gracias. How would you like to go for a ride in a helicopter?”

  “Like whoo whoo whoo?” he asked and spun his finger around in a circle to imitate the blades.

  Mr. Cartwright nodded with an enthusiastic smile.

  “No!” Hector shook his head from side to side.

  “It’s fun,” I encouraged. “We will all go with you and your family will see that you are the hero.”

  He looked at me in suspicious contemplation, then the helicopter actually showed up. It dropped down into the clearing and sent sand and leaves whirling at us.

  “What do you think? Are you brave enough?” Mr. Cartwright asked.

  “Okey dokey,” Hector agreed.

  Trevor, Murphy, Sophie, and I climbed into t
he helicopter behind Mr. Cartwright and Hector. It only took a few minutes to pop over to Hector’s village. We climbed out, and a woman I assumed was his mom came running with her arms open wide. It made me tear up to see them reunited.

  Mr. Cartwright instructed the pilot to keep the engine running while he checked for Mason. Sophie and I ran to our tent to get our bags. On the way back to the helicopter, the nurse rushed towards me with a paper in her hand. “Derian!”

  I stopped and gave my bag to Sophie and told her I’d meet her at the helicopter.

  “Could you please give this to Bill and tell him that he needs to see a doctor immediately,” the nurse said.

  “He hasn’t been here?”

  “No. Isn’t he in the helicopter?”

  “We got separated. I was hoping he was here.”

  She shook her head and looked very concerned. “He needs to see a doctor as soon as possible.”

  “Is it really bad?”

  She smiled with tight lips and hugged me. “They’re waiting for you.”

  I looked over my shoulder. Mr. Cartwright was half-hanging out of the helicopter and waving for me to hurry.

  “Take care,” I said to the nurse and ran to Mason’s tent. I grabbed the wind chime off the post outside, then crawled inside the tent through the flap. There was a backpack hanging from a hook. I stuffed the wind chime in it and searched for the letters that he’d written to me. I found the stack of envelopes stuffed between his foam bedroll and the wooden bed frame. I also saw a drawing tacked on the tent post. I pulled it down and looked at it more closely. It was a sketch of me. I stuffed that and a few items that I thought looked important into the bag before I rushed back out. I ran to the helicopter and the pilot literally lifted off the ground the second that both my feet were inside. I sat down and unfolded the piece of paper the nurse had given me. It was Mason’s blood-test results. I didn’t know what any of the categories meant, but I could see that his numbers were either way higher or way lower than the normal range that was printed beside them.

  I handed it to Murphy and made a confused expression. As he read it, his eyebrows angled together and the creases on his bald head deepened. He folded the paper and gave it back to me. I gestured with my palms out and shrugged so he would know I was waiting for an explanation. He glanced over at Mr. Cartwright, back at me, then out the side window. I kicked the toe of his boot, but he ignored me. Trevor, who had been watching the entire exchange, avoided making eye contact with me once he knew I was looking at him.

  We flew back to the other village and the helicopter touched down in the clearing. Mr. Cartwright hopped out first and talked to the pilot. I turned to Murphy and stared him down. I didn’t even have to ask him, he just spoke, “I’m not a doctor, Deri. He needs to talk to a doctor.”

  “But what do you think it is?”

  “Could be lots of things. His medical information is confidential and it’s none of our business. You shouldn’t have even looked at it.”

  He climbed out of the helicopter and I tried to follow, but Trevor pulled my arm and pushed me back down on the seat.

  “Derian, you have to go to the hospital.”

  “No! I’m not leaving.”

  “You are!” he shouted, then he took a deep breath to force himself to speak more calmly. “You and Sophie need to go back to Acapulco, where it’s safe. We’ll meet you there as soon as we find Mason. He’s probably really close. It won’t take that long.”

  “No. I’m not leaving without him.”

  “You’ll only slow me down. I can find him faster if I don’t have to worry about keeping you safe too. Please do it for me.”

  “I’ll keep up. I can’t leave him.”

  “Deri! You won’t want to be there if—” He stopped himself and stared at me.

  “If what? If he’s dead?”

  He kissed me. “I’ll find him for you. He’s going to be fine. I promise.”

  I pushed past him and jumped out of the helicopter.

  “Get back in the helicopter,” Trevor shouted.

  Murphy caught me and threw me over his shoulder. I pounded the heel of my hand against his back and kicked my legs, but he acted as if he couldn’t even feel the blows.

  “Let go of me! I promised him I wouldn’t leave him alone!” I screamed.

  Murphy literally chucked me into the helicopter and I landed on my ass on the floor. It actually hurt a lot and stunned me. The helicopter took off as I scrambled to get to my feet. I lunged towards the door, but we were already too high to jump. Sophie pulled me back by the waistband of my shorts and made me sit down beside her.

  As the helicopter tilted and flew above the trees, something dinged off the front window of the helicopter and put a hole in the glass. The pilot banked abruptly and got us higher fast. He spoke into his headset and changed the direction we were flying in.

  “What the hell was that?” Sophie asked me.

  I leaned forward and looked more closely at the hole in the window. It was hard to see because the only light was coming off the controls. “I think it was a bullet.”

  “Shit,” she mumbled quietly and turned her face so I couldn’t see her expression.

  The cartel men were obviously really close to the village and I became hysterical at the realization that Trevor, Mason, and Murphy were all in grave danger. I couldn’t actually deal with the reality of losing all of them, so I pretended it was just a horrible dream. To distract myself, I opened Mason’s backpack and pulled out the stack of envelopes that each had my name scribed in Mason’s neat handwriting across the front. I opened the one at the bottom of the pile, turned on a light above my head, and started to read. My hands shook so badly it seemed as if the words danced across the page. The letter was a page and a half long and he had written it on the bus on the way to the camp when he first arrived in Mexico. It was obvious he was excited and scared at the same time. He didn’t know anyone at that point.

  I finished the first one and folded it back into the envelope. I suddenly realized that I might have just seen Trevor for the last time. A weird whimpering sound came out of my throat and I was practically convulsing. I opened Mason’s second letter to prevent myself from jumping out of the helicopter in desperation. It was four pages long. It described everything about the camp and the locals. He mentioned that he had met an interesting kid named Hector, who had given him a woven leather belt and said with a big grin, “Welcome gringo.”

  As I finished the second letter, I heard the pilot telling someone on the radio where the shots had been fired from and how close it was to the village. I couldn’t bear listening, so I opened the next envelope and plugged my ears with my fingers as I read. The third and fourth letters introduced me to a bunch of different volunteers. It described their backgrounds and what brought them to volunteering in Mexico. Mason was fascinated by all of the different lives that people lived. He explained their personalities in detail to me. I felt as if I had actually met them.

  By the fifth letter, it seemed like he missed home a little. His tone sounded sad and he wrote about some of the things he didn’t like about the camp. I was interrupted because we were hovering above the hospital and about to land. There were still about twenty more letters that I had to read, so I packed them in my bag to look at later.

  CHAPTER 22

  The helicopter landed on the roof of the hospital and we were met by a security guard, who escorted us in. A nurse took Sophie and me into an examination room and cleaned up all of our scrapes and gashes while a doctor treated my bullet wound.

  “They’ll be fine,” Sophie reassured me and held my hand.

  “Mason’s sick with something and nobody will tell me what it is.”

  “He doesn’t look sick. I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

  “Ow!” I winced as the doctor stuck a needle into my back. A few minutes later, I could feel him dig around to get the bullet out. Obviously, the needle had a fair amount of anaesthetic in it because it didn’t hurt anymore. E
ventually, I heard a metal clank as the bullet dropped into a pan.

  “Do you want to keep it?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I will,” Sophie said. “Do you care?”

  I shook my head, too depressed to care. The doctor stitched the wound and bandaged it back up. The entire procedure was surprisingly quick and easy. I was able to walk out of the examining room as if nothing had even happened. I felt so guilty for being perfectly fine while, for all I knew, they were all dead.

  Mr. Cartwright had arranged for an SUV to take us back to the resort. It was waiting for us out front. During the ride back to the hotel, I read more letters. Mason wrote about the construction of the school and visiting the ancient ruin for the first time. He went on about how he thought I would love to see the ruin in person. He also described the resort in Acapulco.

  My reading was interrupted again when Sophie said, “I want to see Doug.”

  I put the letter down and hugged her. “As soon as we get back to the resort, we’ll check where the band is right now. Maybe your dad can arrange to get you a flight to meet up with them at their next stop.”

  “I was so mean to him. What if he doesn’t want to see me?”

  “He loves you. He’ll understand why you pushed him away. I know he’ll be happy to see you.”

  When we pulled up in front of the resort, my mom and Jim were standing in the lobby. I jumped out of the truck before it even stopped rolling and ran to them. My mom made a coughing sound as she tried to hold back her tears.

  Sophie’s parents and Kailyn were seated on benches a few feet away. They hadn’t noticed us yet. And standing next to the lobby desk, with his back up against the wall, wearing dark jeans, shit-kicker boots, and a leather jacket, was Doug. I let go of my mom and spun around to see if Sophie had spotted him yet. It took her about two seconds before she saw him. His mouth smiled but his eyes were tearing up. She shrieked and ran across the lobby. He rushed to meet her and their bodies collided. She wrapped her legs around his waist and he swung her around. When they paused to stare at each other, they looked so in love. It made me happy and really sad at the thought that I had already had my reunion and might not get another chance at it.