Unexpected Hero

by Craig Goodwin

  That was easier said than done.

  To someone who hadn’t just survived a whole bunch of deadly Fijian booby traps, the room might have seemed beautiful—an exquisite example of what years of dedication and an extraordinary amount of talent could do. From wall to wall the floor was covered in painstakingly carved shapes and swirls and beautifully colored tiles. But all Benji saw was a deathtrap. Every shape, every line, every tile could set a trap in motion. Any of them could have him impaled or burned or boiled or crushed or killed in dozens of other horrible ways.

  There had to be a way across. Did he need to walk in a certain pattern to avoid being stuck in the middle of a trap? But what could that pattern be?

  At second glance, Benji noticed the floor didn’t actually stop at the wall. The floor and the wall met at a small ledge, maybe two inches high and another two inches deep, almost like a single, small step that followed the entire perimeter of the room.

  As he was looking at the ledge, Benji noticed something odd about the wall. It was normal, except for one thing: it wasn’t straight up and down. If he didn’t look at it too long, it appeared perfect, like every other bit of engineering and architecture so far. But if he turned his head to the side just a little bit, it became obvious that the walls slanted out by just a degree or two. But why?

  “I just wish I didn’t have to walk on that floor. There’s gotta be a way…aahh. There you are.”

  The little ledge. The wall slanting out.

  Benji lay down the torch and, with agonizing slowness and care, eased himself around the corner of the entranceway and into the room. He stood perched on the little ledge with the side of his face against the wall. The wall slanted just far enough to keep him from falling backwards.

  He shuffled inch by inch along the length of the room without any difficulty. Once he reached the corner, he stepped from one ledge to the other. The process was repeated until he touched the back wall. Upon making the turn and looking to the side, Benji saw the secret to reaching the ruby.

  Another small ledge ran out from the wall all the way to the ruby’s pedestal like a narrow bridge. It was completely out of view from the door. Benji carefully stepped over any spaces between cracks in the ledge and made it to the bridge.

  Holding his arms out like a tightrope walker, he put one foot in front of the other and crossed the three-inch-wide bridge with only one or two close calls before reaching the altar. Just as he took the final step to stand before the ruby, Benji heard the thump-thump-thump of boots echoing down the hallways. His heart sank and a sense of failure came over him. The boots stopped in the doorway.

  He was too late.

  Beyond the ruby, Trent Ironside’s jaw dropped. "How...?" The surprised expression morphed into an evil smile. “Well, well, chick. How about you go on and toss us that rock and save us all some time?”

  When Benji didn’t move, Trent pulled a pistol from his waistband and pointed it at him. “Give it to me now, and I might let you live.”

  30.

  Caught?

  Benji focused on the ruby, then on the gun barrel and then back to the ruby. He saw the men standing behind Trent, each one armed with pistols, submachine guns, and even a few grenades. An unarmed fourteen-year-old didn't stand a chance.

  “Come on, little kid, toss it over,” taunted the man to Trent’s right. “We don’t have all night.”

  “I heard what you said at the airport, Trent.” Benji glared at him. “And at the bridge in the woods. I know you’re going to kill all those innocent people if you get this.”

  “So that was you in the woods,” Trent said as he gave a sidelong glance at the man who must have been Anders. “Listen, all you gotta do is hand that over, Stone. And mind your own freaking business.”

  Trent tightened his hand on the pistol and Benji knew he would do it. Trent would shoot him, take the ruby, and then he and his men would kill the descendants of Magellan—along with all the witnesses.

  Or Benji could just hand it over like Trent said. They might spare his life, but he doubted it. People like Trent's dad didn’t like loose ends.

  There was only one way Benji had any chance of making it out alive—and it was an almost non-existent chance.

  Without any more thought, he picked up the ruby and stepped out onto the floor.

  31.

  Just another swim

  BANG!

  A five ton slab of rock crashed down into the doorway and sealed the room. Although now safe from Trent, Benji was trapped. He shoved the ruby into his backpack and walked around the room, grateful the torch was on his side of the giant, immovable door.

  “Come on, come on! There’s gotta be a way out!”

  He ran his hand over the walls and the pedestal that had held the ruby. Nothing. Suddenly, the sound of grinding stone filled the room. A huge section of the back wall began to slide up. Could this be a way out? Was there a passage?

  Benji knew enough not to get his hopes up. The last time there had been the sudden grinding of stone on stone he’d nearly ended up as a stain on a wall.

  But still, he took a small step forward, a glimmer of hope rising in his chest. It was smothered in an instant as water charged into the room under the rising wall. It churned and frothed white, filling the chamber. The torch burned out with a hiss and the room went dark.

  “No! Where is it?!”

  Benji’s heart raced and his head spun as he sloshed through the water, feeling for some way out. The water was at his ankles, then his knees. His waist. It was rising fast.

  “Come on!”

  The water was freezing and Benji shivered. It rose past his belly to his chest, and in no time he found himself treading water. He put one arm up, and felt the ceiling above him. He tried not to cry. This was it, the end.

  No one would ever find him.

  Wait.

  There was a way out. He swam along the wall, through the swirling water, and made his way closer to the gap in the back wall.

  “Oh, I hope this works.”

  It’s just another swim. Just another swim.

  Just as the water reached the ceiling, he took a deep breath and ducked under the cold water, stuffing his hat into his shirt before swimming towards the opening in the wall. With one last kick, Benji was through the hole and yanked from the room by a current too strong to fight.

  Hands in front of his face and legs out, he protected himself as best as he could while racing down the pitch black underground river. He banged his knees, elbows, and back in the twists and turns. Each impact knocked a bit more wind from his burning lungs. He longed for air.

  Thirty seconds passed. Forty-five. Still he sped through the dark tunnel with no light at the end. Benji’s head pounded and he started to feel detached, like he was going to pass out.

  Benji fought the feeling. If he lost consciousness, he would die. But he was fading.

  A minute passed.

  The current slowed and stopped, and Benji drifted. He opened his eyes and looked around. Above him, through the clear water, he saw the moon. His feet hit sand and gravel and he pushed up with the last of his strength.

  Benji gasped, inhaling both the cool night air and the cold water. Coughing, he dragged himself to the stony bank and threw up in the shallows.

  The stones dug into his back as he rolled over, still coughing. Coughing, but alive.

  32.

  A walk in the dark

  Tears fell from the corners of Benji’s eyes and down the sides of his face and he grinned. He’d never felt such relief in his life.

  “I’m alive! And f-freezing!”

  The cool night air that felt so good filling his lungs was now pulling the heat from his wet body. He needed to get moving to stay warm. Although Fiji was warm and tropical during the day, the cool highland temperatures could make him hypothermic just as easily as at home in New Hampshire.

  He heard the roar of a waterfall close by and stood, putting on his hat. Just a few dozen f
eet from where Benji had pulled himself from the pool was the first of two falls. It was a good two-story drop to the bottom. The next one was higher. The water fell nearly eighty feet before crashing onto the rocks below and filling the night with a never-ending roar.

  Benji turned away and peeked inside his bag at the ruby.

  “What do I do with this thing?”

  Trent and his men were still out there. What if they caught him? They couldn’t get the ruby. That would spell certain death for Benji and the villagers. He needed to hide it. As long as only Benji knew where it was, he was safe. Or so he hoped.

  The jungle surrounding him offered endless hiding places. He needed to be able to find it again, so the spot had to be somewhere out of sight and unobvious, but easy to remember.

  “There we go.”

  Not far from the waterfall stood a bamboo grove with a small pile of rocks beside it. Benji moved each stone to the side slowly, careful not to disturb the dirt, leaves, and grass. Once the pile was moved and nothing but bare dirt remained, he dug a small hole with his hands, pulled the ruby from his bag, and dropped it in. He then re-built the stone pile like nothing ever happened.

  “Alright.” He stood, brushing his hands on his pants. “Time to get out of here.”

  Benji figured the best way to find help was to follow the river. Eventually, it would either lead him to a village or the ocean—either one meant finding help and finding his way back to his mom.

  But first he had to deal with these waterfalls. The smaller one was flanked by twenty foot cliffs that stretched unbroken into the forest. In the bright moonlight, Benji looked over the edge and saw that the cliff offered plenty of foot and hand holds, and halfway down a grass-covered ledge jutted out like bad under bite.

  “I can do this,” Benji told himself. Inside he wasn’t so sure; he would be climbing down twenty feet in the dark—not an easy job.

  He eased over the edge backwards, groping with his feet for something to put his weight on. There! He tested the bit of rock and it held. A good hand hold proved easy to find and he made his way down the small cliff, taking a short break on the grassy ledge.

  In another time, Benji might have been tempted to stay on the ledge. The night air was cool, but not quite cold. The moonlight covered the river and trees with a shadowy glow and the twin waterfalls played a constant, rushing soundtrack to the evening, drowning out even the loudest of insects. He felt himself dozing…and snapped out of it, shaking himself awake.

  Gotta keep moving.

  Benji climbed the rest of the way down and followed the river another fifty yards to the next waterfall. The way was difficult and littered with boulders. The water started slow and lazy from at the base of the smaller of the two falls, but gradually sped up to rolling whitewater before tumbling over the cliff to the rocks eighty feet below.

  Climbing down a cliff that high in the dark was too much of a risk. Benji’s only option was to follow the cliff into the forest and try to find a way down that wouldn’t end with a broken neck. He left the river and the moonlight behind, entering the dark forest once again.

  He wandered along, following the cliff. Soon, though, Benji walked out from under the cover of the trees and stood at the edge of a field of the same long, golden grass he’d seen waving in the wind on his first day in the highlands. The grass was much taller than he’d imagined, standing higher than Benji could reach on his tiptoes.

  Two steps into the field and the forest disappeared. Long stalks of grass surrounded him. Without any landmarks to judge his progress by, he immediately lost all sense of direction.

  Blades of grass sliced through his skin like dozens of paper cuts as Benji fumbled through the field, falling more times than he could count. What seemed to be a straight line was instead a subtle curve to the right, a course that slowly led him back the way he’d come.

  When Benji reached the edge of the field, he breathed a sigh of relief. At least now he could see where he was going and not fall on his rear end every other step. So he walked on, searching for the cliff and his way out. Benji stopped short.

  He found the cliff, alright. Except...

  He was back where he started.

  "To heck with that grass again," he mumbled, looking at his bloody hands. "Not a chance. Looks like the river's out. Now what?"

  He leaned against a tree and dug through the remains of his backpack. A smile touched his face as his cold fingers pulled a few soggy bites of a granola bar from the remaining pocket. With a small smile, he chewed with his mouth open and imagined his mom’s reaction.

  Everyone’s got to be so worried, he thought. It’s been hours since I should have been back.

  "Well, I've got to get out of here one way or another."

  Benji picked a direction at random and left the cliff behind. He needed to put as much distance between the ruby and himself as he could. If Trent and the rest of his crew caught up with him he didn't want them to find it. So he walked. Hopefully not in circles this time.

  Though the direction was random, it was straight, and soon he found himself facing a chest-high barbed wire fence. Small flecks of rust showed the fence’s age, but the tips of the barbs still looked plenty sharp. The underbrush seemed thinner on the other side of the fence, and Benji thought he saw a trail cutting its way through.

  After tossing his bag over, he eased himself between two strands of wire and managed to make it through with nothing more than a small cut to his back. A few steps away from the fence he stood on a game trail.

  It was covered in what looked like hoof prints, both large and small. He heard the deep snorts and grunts through the trees of something big and had the strong desire to get out of there—fast.

  He looked both left and right on the trail; each side looked the same and neither seemed to hold more promise than the other.

  On a whim, Benji turned right and started walking, following the hoof prints of wild pigs and whatever else, and hoping that he was headed somewhere worth going.

  The path meandered around trees, hills, and ravines, and was thankfully free of vines and the long, sharp thorns that had torn so many holes in Benji’s clothes.

  He came to a corner in the fence and the well-beaten trail turned with it. However, a narrower trail kept going past the barbed wire fence. Benji climbed through. He kept walking, following the smaller game trail. Without tree branches and vines pulling at him or tall grass blocking his sight and cutting up his hands, he made good time. He put miles behind him before coming to an intersection.

  The game trail crossed another path. A path covered in footprints. It looked familiar. It was the trail that led from the willow tree to the tunnel.

  Benji could either continue straight and follow the game trail deeper into the jungle, or turn onto the new trail and take it to the road. Sticking to the woods, for now, seemed like the best choice.

  Suddenly, a flashlight lit up and blinded him.

  “Hey, you! Kid! Stop right there!”

  33.

  Captured!

  Benji crashed through the woods with his pursuer close behind.

  FASTER!

  A tree root caught his foot, sending him sprawling on his belly on the forest floor. Trent’s goon dove and grabbed Benji’s ankle just as the boy scrambled to get to his feet. He crashed back to the ground and kicked like crazy, trying to get free. His foot smashed into the man’s nose and he released Benji’s ankle with a shout.

  Benji leapt to his feet and ran. He risked a glance back. The man was back up and hot on Benji’s heels. Benji looked ahead and—

  BAM!

  His feet flew out from under him and he lay on the ground, staring up at the tree limb that had just clotheslined him. The solid limb went in and out of focus. Benji tried not to pass out. He was once again blinded by a bright flashlight.

  “Ya mine now, punk,” came a voice muffled by a bloody nose.

  The man flipped Benji onto his belly, yanked off the backpack, and
used a thin rope to tie his hands together behind his back. Then he picked the boy up, slung him roughly over his shoulder, and made his way back to the Land Rovers. Dazed from the tree limb, and with his mind spinning from the sudden turn of events, Benji didn’t notice he was being dropped until he hit the dirt road.

  “Ooooh, my head.”

  He rolled onto his back and stared up into the man's ugly face. Blood dripped from his nose.

  “Shut up. I don't know who the devil ya are, but I'm thinkin' I should keep ya 'round. What're ya doin' out here, anyway? Yer just gonna lay there and be quiet 'til the boss’s kid gets back and he can figure out what to do with ya.”

  “Wait, I-”

  “I told ya to keep yer mouth shut.” He drew a very large, very scary knife out from behind his back and held the tip to Benji’s nose. “You keep runnin' your mouth and I’m gonna get mad. Ya don't want me mad, kid. Understand?”

  Shaking, Benji nodded the smallest nod he dared to avoid cutting his nose open on what looked like a dangerously sharp blade. Satisfied, the man returned the knife to its sheath. He walked off a few yards and lit a cigarette.

  Now what?

  Strong. He had to be strong. There was no use crying or begging. As long as Benji knew where the ruby was and Trent didn’t, they wouldn’t kill him. But if they found out where it was, not only would the villagers lose their lives, but so would Benji. It was like the man said—he needed to keep his mouth shut. Lives depended on it.

  A voice, tense and angry, floated through the night air. Trent and his men were back.

  “My father is not going to be happy about your screw up.”

  Anders ignored the baseball star and kept walking. Trent followed close behind and pointed a finger at the back of the older man's head. Benji could see the furious looks on both of their faces.