Scavenger Hunt

by John R. Little

  “That’s it?”

  Jonathan stared at Pietre. “You got a better idea?”

  Pietre frowned and walked away.

  Pietre - Two Years Earlier

  In high school, Pietre had always been the guy with the funny name. He wasn’t even Spanish or whatever culture might have a name like that. He was just an average everyday white guy whose parents wanted their son to be called Peter, but not just a normal Peter. He had to be unique.

  He hated his name and he hated that he was chunkier than everyone else in school. It made him an easy target for bullies. At least until he became friends with Jonathan. Then nobody bothered him about his name, his weight, or anything else. Nobody fucked with Jonathan.

  Now, at 26, Pietre liked his name. It did make him different from everyone else, and that was cool.

  What wasn’t cool was the past few months. She wasn’t cool at all.

  She fucking ruined his life.

  He sat in his apartment and stared at the dead 46-inch HD plasma TV that lay in pieces in front of him. His laptop computer was buried somewhere in the middle of the mess. An hour ago, Family Guy was playing and the fucking idiocy of Peter Griffin — or whatever the fuck his name was — just caused Pietre to blow. Griffin was selfish, overweight, a heavy drinker, and stupid. It was too much like looking in the mirror these days. Pietre grabbed the laptop without even thinking and took care of the idiot.

  It was her fault. All her fault.

  Allyson.

  He finished the last of the six-pack of Coors that he’d had in the fridge and thought about going out for more, when he stared once more at the mess in front of him.

  After the TV exploded when the laptop hit, he hadn’t stopped. He threw his printer on the pile, then his microwave.

  They’d all been gifts for he and Allyson. Even the huge TV was a gift from his parents. All bad memories. All gone to shit.

  “I’m better off without you, bitch.”

  Somehow his words didn’t ring true. Every morning when he woke, he smelled her scent on the pillow beside him. He saw the empty space in the closet that used to hold her clothes. The alarm clock she didn’t take. The wedding gifts that she abandoned, as if she didn’t want to take anything that might remind her of him.

  He had them all, and it hit him that he should do the same vanishing act. He couldn’t leave her when her ghost laughed at him in his apartment 24 hours a day.

  He felt the familiar pain in his heart. She had been The One.

  Pietre walked to his office, a small room that doubled as a storage area. He had some old back issues of National Geographic that he’d kept from the days when he was interested in archeology as a teen. He always imagined himself out in a dig in New Mexico or maybe up in Alberta or God knows where. He’d bought every copy of the magazine that had articles about dinosaurs, paleontology, or archeology.

  He flipped through them, remembering the map he wanted. It only took about ten minutes for him to find it. A fold-out map of the United States. It showed the major oil deposits in gray and minerals of various kinds in other colors.

  The map detached from the magazine easily enough and he took it and pinned it to the corkboard that hung above his desk.

  The darts were easier to find. He’d had a set from his days in college. He and Jonathan were always playing darts in the pub. Pietre rarely won.

  He threw the first dart and it didn’t even touch the cork. It banged the wall and fell to the floor.

  The second one stuck in the corkboard but missed the map altogether. Finally, on the third try, he hit somewhere in the U.S. He had to move close to the map to see that the dart was in Colorado.

  “Good. East.”

  He’d start packing first thing in the morning.

  Samantha - Porto Velho

  Samantha volunteered to take care of planning the trip down the Amazon. Carl would never imagine she could be talking to the local villagers about hiring a boat that would take them down river. The villagers weren’t much taller than she was and none of them spoke any English. Although Jonathan spoke Portuguese, Samantha spoke Spanish and there were some similarities.

  She wanted to pull her own weight. It would be easy to always rely on Jonathan. She wouldn’t let that happen. She wanted to earn her share of the ten million. She needed her self-esteem intact at the end of the show if she was ever going to be able to deal with Carl.

  Much of her talking to the villagers was in sign language and pointing at a map that she pulled up on her computer. She zoomed the map so that it showed the town of Porto Velho and also their destination of Rio Branco, about 300 miles away.

  It was harder to explain why they wanted to capture four piranhas and keep them alive on the trip. Samantha had had a long time to read about piranhas on the ridiculously long journey from the Galapagos and realized that Cynthia had planned the piranha as a gimmick for ratings. Most people thought the fish were dangerous man-eating monsters, but her research showed that most of that was mythology. That wouldn’t stop the audience from thinking the task was really dangerous.

  The boat was flat-bottomed and creaked.

  “That’s really the best you could find us, Sammie?” asked Pietre. He was smiling.

  “You should’ve seen our other options.”

  “What’d this set us back?” asked Jonathan. “How’s our budget?”

  Samantha checked her spreadsheet. “By the time we finish this task, we’ll be down $20,000. We have six more weeks and only $30,000 in cash left.”

  “Shit. That can’t be right.” Jonathan took her tablet and stared at the finances.

  Pietre stared at the other two, not really wanting to get involved. Sammie knew that keeping track of money wasn’t his thing. He went to stare over the side of the boat, leaving her with Jonathan.

  “It’s the goddamn flights that are killing us.”

  “I know. But we haven’t had a lot of choice. We talked about this. We wanted speed over cost-savings.”

  She stared at him. What she wanted to say was “YOU wanted speed over cost-savings,” but there was no point antagonizing him.

  “We need to reconsider. We’re making good time. Next time we — ”

  “Oh, fuck!”

  Samantha jerked her head up and saw Pietre holding tightly to the railing of the boat. “What’s wrong?” she shouted.

  “My stomach… God, it hurts.”

  Pietre was leaning over the railing as if he was going to vomit. He was breathing hard and moaning.

  Appendicitis? Food poisoning? Some weird rain forest virus?

  Shit. Samantha went to Pietre’s right side. Jonathan was on his left.

  “Where’s it hurt?” she asked quietly. She slipped easily into her flight attendant role, trained to handle many small medical situations.

  Pietre didn’t reply. He just shook his head.

  Samantha felt his forehead. He was sweating but didn’t have a fever.

  Carefully she reached over and pressed the lower right part of his mid-section, not far from his hip. Not hard, just to see if there was a reaction.

  Nothing.

  Probably not appendicitis.

  She tried to lift his head up and turn it so she could look into his eyes. “Tell me where it hurts.”

  Suddenly, he pushed her arms away. “Fuck you! Leave me the fuck alone!”

  Samantha was stunned and felt something she never imagined she’d feel from being with Pietre: fear. He seemed crazy and at that moment, she had no question that he would hit her if she blocked his way. Hit hard.

  She moved away, and so did Jonathan on the other side. He sees it too.

  Pietre stumbled to the side door, and walked down the steps to the cabin below, leaving the two other team members shaken and confused.

  Chapter 15: Team Superior

  Tanya - Seven Years Earlier

  Tanya Morawski was fourteen years old when her life changed. She was already the brunt of jokes for her Polish heritage, her slim build, and
being the shortest girl in school. The last thing she wanted was to find out she was different in yet another way.

  Her parents had moved to the Bronx when she was two. She spoke Polish at home to her parents, but she didn’t have an accent like her two older brothers did. They were eighteen and twenty years old, and she sometimes liked to joke around and call them immigrants when they’d mispronounce a word, but she loved them dearly, and they took care of her in a way her parents never could. Mom and Dad could only stumble through English, but they worked long hours running a small convenience store that imported food from Warsaw. There was a big enough Polish population in the Bronx to keep them in business, and all they really wanted was a better life for their three kids.

  Tanya wanted that, too. She wanted to be sure that her parents didn’t work their asses off for her and her not appreciate it. She always would.

  As she’d grown older, though, she realized something was wrong. She wasn’t like other girls. Two years earlier, her friends would giggle and gossip about the boys in their class, but she didn’t really understand what they were getting so excited about.

  Now, at fourteen… she still didn’t find herself interested in boys. Not in that way, at least. In fact, she found herself much more interested in looking at girls.

  She found herself hanging around with boys, but only as friends. She didn’t feel any of the things that the other girls talked about.

  That scared the shit out of her.

  It was time to spend more time with girls. Maybe she needed to spend the time with them to really appreciate how boys should make her feel.

  Noelle sat beside her in English class. She was bright and funny and seemed to like Tanya a lot. Tanya started to wear dresses and fit in like the other girls. She hated it because that meant having to go shopping for new clothes, which was about the most boring thing ever.

  But something was wrong with her, and she had to fix it.

  Noelle had lost her mother three years ago. Now it was just her and her dad, and that somehow gave Noelle the confidence to try anything she wanted. She already knew she wanted to work as a stock broker. Tanya had no idea what that even meant.

  Noelle and she talked about guys, and one day Zack Miller asked Tanya to go to a movie with her.

  “You’ve got to go!” said Noelle. “You’ll have a great time. I bet he’s a wonderful kisser…”

  Tanya turned red at the thought of kissing Zach. On top of embarrassment, the thought didn’t appeal to her at all.

  Zach brought flowers for her. He opened doors for her. He was kind and gentle and she couldn’t have asked for a better first date.

  But, he did nothing for her. When he leaned in to kiss her at her door at the end of the evening, she almost gagged at the thought. She turned her cheek and that’s where his lips landed. She just smiled politely and told him she didn’t kiss on the first date.

  “Can I call you?”

  “Sure!” But she knew he wouldn’t. And she didn’t want him to.

  She went to her bedroom and cried into her pillow. She couldn’t hide the truth anymore. She was gay. She started thinking about the attractive girls she knew and imagined kissing each one. She was aroused each time. No guy could do that for her.

  The next day she had lunch with Noelle, who was talking about their English assignment when Tanya blurted out, “I’m gay.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “What do you mean, you know? I just admitted it to myself last night.”

  “I’ve seen the way you look at other girls. I never mentioned it because I didn’t want to pry into your own business or anything. Actually I was a little upset that you never looked at me that way. What? Am I not your type or something?” She laughed.

  A few weeks later, Tanya was hanging out in Noelle’s room. Noelle was working on a paper for school, but Tanya was bored. She flipped through a magazine that had been lying on Noelle’s bed. After a while, Tanya noticed Noelle was looking at her.

  “You ever kiss a girl?” Noelle asked.

  Tanya blushed. “No, I’ve never kissed anybody.”

  “What do you think of me?”

  “You’re cool. You’re my best friend.”

  “No. I mean do you think I’m pretty?”

  Tanya stared at her long brown hair and her nice smooth skin. She loved that Noelle was always smiling and laughing. “You’re gorgeous,” she whispered.

  Noelle got up and sat with Tanya on the bed. “If I was into girls, would you want to be with me?”

  Tanya could only nod.

  The next thing that happened seared into Tanya’s memory, never to be forgotten. Noelle put her hands on Tanya’s face and kissed her mouth gently.

  Tanya went completely weak. A moan escaped from her lips. Their lips parted and their tongues met. It was a slow, passionate kiss.

  Noelle pushed Tanya down on the bed and they lay together, kissing. They got more excited and Tanya let her hand wander, first touching Noelle’s hair and then she moved her hand to her breast.

  “Oh, that feels nice,” said Noelle. She moved her own hand to touch Tanya’s body, too.

  Tanya had never been so aroused in her life. It felt like all her nerves were exploding at once.

  Then Noelle pulled away.

  “Why did you do that?” asked Tanya. She didn’t know whether to try to pull Noelle back or leave her alone.

  “Just curious.”

  Noelle smiled and went back to her paper. Tanya just lay in the bed, stunned at what had happened. Noelle moved to her computer and started typing, acting like nothing at all had happened.

  They never mentioned that day again. Things were back to normal, but Tanya never forgot it.

  Tanya - The Amazon

  Team Superior was camped about fifty miles east of Porto Velho. Darkness was crowding them, making Tanya feel a tinge of fear.

  She mentally scolded herself. She, Maria, and Emma were sitting around the campfire that Cathy had built. Tanya thought Cathy wasn’t supposed to help them do anything, but the girl had just gone ahead and gathered some dry shrubbery and pulled out her lighter, and voila, they had a campfire.

  Then the bigger surprise. Cathy had packed a box along with them on the helicopter and now opened it up.

  “Party time!”

  Tanya stared as Cathy pulled out four bottles of red wine. “What the heck?”

  “Courtesy of Cynthia and Rick,” Cathy said. “They wanted to reward you for surviving the first leg, especially since it was such a tough one, losing Rob.”

  For a few moments, there was only silence in the camp, with the only sounds being some chirping insects.

  “We’re safe here, right?” asked Tanya. “I mean, we’re all alone, just the four of us.”

  Emma took one of the wine bottles and looked at it. “Cathy must have a way of calling for help. It’s not like there’s any head-hunting pygmies out here, anyway. Right, Cath?”

  Cathy didn’t reply. She used a corkscrew to open the first bottle and then pulled out four wine glasses and served the team.

  “Who wants to make a toast?” she asked.

  Emma and Maria looked at each other, pretending not to hear. Tanya almost laughed. They needed more backbone. “Here’s to the best reality show ever and to our team sharing the grand prize!”

  They clinked glasses and sipped the wine. Tanya took a look at the label: a ten-year-old French merlot. She had no idea if that was good or bad, but it tasted great, so she took another drink.

  They were in a clearing where the copter had dropped them off about an hour ago. Tanya knew she could check her GPS device and computer to find exactly where they were, but what was the point? She knew they were somewhere in the middle of Brazil, with rain forests surrounding them on all sides.

  Some small animal wandered by and she watched it. It was about the size of a house cat but there’s no chance there’d be something like that out here. The twilight made it hard to see clearly, and she thought maybe that wa
s a good thing.

  She did open up her tablet and read the instructions one more time. They’d all pretty much memorized them but it still scared her.

  Once you get to Porto Velho, you’ll be flown by helicopter to somewhere in the Amazonian rain forest. You must hike fifty miles east of there, following the directions on your GPS. This will be wild country.

  They’d needed to each reaffirm that they waived liability at that point by pressing their fingerprints to the touch pad.

  Once you reach your destination, you’ll be taken in a hot air balloon which will fly you to Maranon. You must steal a poisonous dart from the local tribe. More directions will be waiting for you there.

  Tanya thought about Emma’s comment regarding head-hunters. Who else would have poisonous darts? Surely, Cynthia wouldn’t truly send them on a dangerous mission. Would she?

  “You guys worried?”

  Maria laughed. She always laughed. She was always so happy and cheerful that many people found her totally annoying. Not Tanya.

  Emma pursed her lips. “We know they’re not risking Cathy’s life. As long as she’s with us, we’re safe.”

  Cathy didn’t say anything. She just filled up everyone’s wine glasses, finishing the first bottle. She worked on opening the second bottle before finally admitting, “I don’t know anything more about the trip than you guys do. They keep us in the dark, too.”

  “Really?” asked Tanya. “That’s hard to believe.”

  “I knew about the wine, of course, and I have a hotwired connection to the closest authorities on my tab, but — ” She flipped open her own computer and pressed an icon. “ — right now, that’s the Brazilian Guard. They have a staff of ten about thirty miles from here. If we have an emergency…”

  “We’re fucked,” finished Emma.

  The second bottle of wine went faster than the first. By nine o’clock, darkness had totally swallowed everything except the few feet surrounding their small fire.

  “Hey, Maria, you know songs. Sing for us.” Tanya moved her chair closer, knowing Maria could never resist a chance to sing. She thought a bit and then started singing “What a Wonderful World.” In her mind, Tanya imagined her singing a duet with Louis Armstrong. She stared at Maria, who’s dark skin shone by the firelight.