Page 22 of Here for a Good Time

“Is that—” Zwe begins.

“Leila?” I finish.

Another, younger voice also calls out, “Mr. Zwe! Ms. Poe!” A male voice.

“Antonio?” Zwe asks.

As the footsteps near, Zwe crouches even lower, and I get as low on my knees as my ankle can handle. “What if this is poison ivy?” I look around with a newfound suspicion at the various shades and sizes of green in which we’re immersing ourselves.

“It’s not poison ivy,” Zwe replies.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. Wishful thinking.”

“Zwe!” I hiss.

“Even if it is, we won’t die from poison ivy. We will die from armed women who are pretending to be people we know in order to lure us out into the open, so ssshhh!”

They’re still shouting our names, getting closer and closer until the sources of the two voices come into view. It is Leila and Antonio. Better yet, it’s just them, and there are no strange, masked people forcing them to call out for us at gunpoint.

They pause in approximately the same spot Zwe and I had stood in while we were hugging. “Are you sure it was this trail?” Leila huffs. Antonio gives her a sheepish look. “Oh my god!” she exclaims, shoving his shoulder.

“I’m ninety percent sure!” he retorts. “It was dark, I couldn’t see exactly where they ran!”

“We haven’t seen any shoe prints for hours!”

“The wind could’ve covered them up with debris,” Antonio says, then points at the forest. “Or maybe they pivoted to a different path from here. If that’s the case, then that’s not my fault they went off track.”

“I knew I shouldn’t have let you come with me,” Leila shoots back.

“ Let me?” Antonio scoffs. “Need I remind you—”

“Antonio?” Zwe asks. I’d been so engrossed in their conversation that I hadn’t noticed Zwe standing up to reveal himself. He waves, and Leila and Antonio break out into relieved grins the second they spot him.

“Mr. Zwe!” Antonio’s already bounding over. “See, I told you this was the right path,” he adds over his shoulder to Leila, who rolls her eyes.

“Just go and help them,” she orders.

Zwe helps me stand back up, and as soon as I’m on my feet, Antonio throws his arms around me.

“Ms. Poe! We thought you were dead! Well, at least I did. You didn’t really look like the hiking type when you arrived, but—” He gestures at me from head to toe.

“—I was mistaken. My apologies.” This fucking kid, I think, too overcome with joy to be offended.

“You weren’t too far off, to be fair,” Zwe mutters. I give his ribs a sharp elbow.

“I’m so happy to see you two.” I can feel how big my grin is. “How did you guys escape?”

“Leila managed to cut through her zip tie,” Antonio says, jerking a thumb at her.

“I had a small knife on me,” she explains.

“We have several emergency kits around the resort. I managed to get to the one at the bar before they found me. I also picked this one up—” She dangles a small square red bag that she’d been holding on to this whole time.

“—at the start of the trail.” She nods at me.

“I saw you take that nasty tumble yesterday. Thought maybe you’d need it. I’m not just a pretty face, you know.”

“Clearly,” Zwe says. All three of us whip our heads in his direction. His eyes widen and his cheeks redden in keeping with the symptoms of someone who accidentally said a thought out loud.

Leila blushes right back. “Thanks,” she says, and, to my even bigger surprise, lightly shoves his shoulder with her own.

Zwe looks down at his bicep as though the spot where her bare arm touched him might’ve left some sort of tattoo, like a cursive Leila was here.

There’s a spasm in my chest. I look over at Antonio, who waggles his brows up and down at me.

“Can you walk?” Leila asks, turning to me and trying to get a better look at my foot.

“Yeah. Can’t, like, climb up a tree in case of danger, but I can walk at a more-than-leisurely pace.”

She offers me her arm. “Come on, let’s get you back on the path. You can sit down and I’ll wrap a bandage around that ankle to keep the swelling down. We need to bring you back in one piece, after all. We should also generally stay out of the grass. You know there are snakes in here.”

“I am trying very hard to not know that,” I say. Then, remembering, I hobble-turn to Antonio. “Speaking of yesterday, thank you for providing that distraction. We owe you our lives.”

He waves us away. “You know what they say about teamwork.”

“What do they say about teamwork?” Zwe asks, a curious lilt to his voice.

“If you take out the ‘team’ in ‘teamwork,’ it’s just work, and who wants that?” Antonio answers, looking proud. I can’t tell if that’s a joke, or if he genuinely thinks that’s a saying that people throw around.

“They do say that,” Zwe says earnestly, throwing me an I love this kid expression behind Antonio’s head as we make our way out of the bush.

Zwe and Antonio help me sit down on the side of the path. I wince as Leila removes my sneaker. “Is it broken?”

With gentle motions, she lifts and examines it. “Pretty sure it’s not, but it is injured. The bandage will help in the meantime,” she says, already getting started on the procedure.

“I’m so glad you guys escaped,” I say. “But Leila, how did you hide the knife from them? Didn’t they search you before tying you up?”

“When I heard the gunshots, I slipped it into my shoe right before they caught me.”

“Smart,” Zwe and I both say at the same time. I slide him a smirk that he pretends not to see.

“How’s this pressure?” Leila asks me.

I try wiggling my foot. “Good,” I say. “It’s not too tight.”

“Great, let me just tape this up.” Holding the bandage with one hand, she deftly takes out a roll of tape with the other, and Antonio helps cut off a piece.

“There we go. Perfect. I’m going to hold on to this knife, but ditch the bag.

And now—” She stands up, tucks the knife into her back pocket, and indicates in a random direction.

“I’m so sorry to be blunt about this, but, um, I have to go pee. Be right back.”

“How about you?” I ask Antonio after she’s left. “How’d you get free?”

“Pfft, easy,” he says. He holds his fists out side by side, palms facing down.

“When they ask you to put your hands together, you give them your hands like this because it makes your wrists bigger.” He aligns his fists so that all eight knuckles form a straight line.

“Then after they tied me, when they weren’t looking, I just turned my fists so they were facing inward—” He rotates his hands to demonstrate, his thumbs now facing upward.

“It takes a bit of time, but as soon as you get the first thumb out, the rest is pretty easy.”

Zwe and I look at each other, speechless. “How the hell do you know that?” I ask.

Antonio shrugs. “Don’t remember. I know a lot of things. I’m not just a pretty face either, you know.”

“Did you help Leila get free?” I ask.

“Nah, we kinda managed it at the same time. There weren’t any guards around so it was pretty easy to sneak away, too.

Actually, I think they were scattered because they were trying to find you two.

Anyway, I was already close to freeing my right thumb when Leila took off her shoe and retrieved her knife. ”

“Why didn’t you two free everyone else?”

At that, his generally peppy face droops, making him look like a toddler who got told off in front of the entire class. “We didn’t have time. They told us to leave and get help. I promised my grandpa I’d come back and save him.”

Above his head, Zwe and I exchange pained expressions. “Hey, we will,” Zwe says, clapping Antonio’s shoulder.

“Thanks, friends,” he mumbles through a faint, hopeful smile.

“Do you think—” I swallow. “Did it seem like they wanted to hurt anyone? The bad guys, I mean. Any information you can give us is useful.”

Antonio’s brows pull together in concentration.

“I don’t know,” he says at last. “They always went off to the side to talk, and they kept their voices down. They’d take us to the bathroom if we wanted to use it, and they passed out water and sandwiches and fruit that they collected from the kitchen. ”

“That’s good,” Zwe says.

“But they were also so…” He gazes off into the distance, as though attempting to recall what he saw.

“So what?” I prompt.

“Angry,” he says. “They would break things.”

“Break things?” Zwe asks.

Antonio nods. “Throw vases over the hill and laugh. Smash the computers. They were destroying… everything. Like, everything .”

Zwe and I exchange a That’s not good look behind his head. Every time I close my eyes, I see that woman’s face, the unfiltered fury in her eyes, how her jaw clenched like she wanted to rip me apart with her bare hands.

“I know the clock is ticking, and we don’t know what their final plan is, but the fact that they’re looking after everyone in the meantime is good,” Zwe says in his best attempt at a reassuring voice.

“It means we might be able to negotiate with them, and they might not actually want to hurt anybody.”

“Is everyone there?” I ask. “Sandra and Eka too?”

Antonio nods. “Everybody.”

“I’m back!” Leila’s voice catches our collective attention. She raises her open palms. “Don’t worry, I washed my hands in a creek. Anyway, should we get going? What was the plan?”

“You know, it’s a good thing that you of all people were the one who escaped,” Zwe says. Once he’s on his feet, I lift my arms to ask for help, and he reaches under each of my armpits to gently get me up, too. “We were going to go to your family.”

Leila’s face pinches with puzzlement. “My… family?”

Zwe points up in the general direction of a mountain.

“You said your family still lives here on the island, right? We figured they must have some way to contact the mainland. And out of all the hiking trails, this was the longest one and the only one that included a lunch break, so we took a wild guess that this trail led to the village.”

“It does! Holy shit, that’s brilliant!” Antonio punches Zwe’s arm. “Well, well, well, look at us, a quartet of pretty and smart faces.”

“They do have phones, right?” I ask Leila, who looks confused. “Your family, I mean. They have a phone, right? Maybe a satellite phone?”

“Oh, yes, of course.” Chuckling, she rolls her eyes and points to her head. “Sorry, I’m really tired and sort of thirsty. My brain isn’t working quite right.”

“Here, take a sip,” Zwe says, already unzipping his bag.

“No, you guys need it for your—” Leila argues.

“We all need to,” Zwe cuts in. When she opens her mouth to argue again, he reaches over, opens one of her hands, puts the body of the bottle against her palm, closes her fingers around it, and closes his fingers on top of hers. “I insist.”

“Well,” she says with a playful smirk, “if the guest insists, ” she adds as they hold their gaze.

“Right!” I say, a little forcefully. I am very happy for Zwe, but this is not the time nor place for a little flirtatious exchange. “Shall we head for the village? Preferably before the bad guys catch us? Zwe, do you want to check the map?”

Leila shakes her head. “That map might not be much good. Sorry, we shouldn’t have left that in your room, our hiking options are quite limited right now.

Management has been drawing up plans to expand into the forest as well, and they’ve built some new paths and dug up certain places so they’re not accessible anymore. They want to build a helipad.”

“A helipad? That’s honestly a shame, this place is beautiful,” I say, taking in the surroundings.

“I know,” Antonio says. “They also want to build a new glamping experience or something.”

“I sort of know a new shortcut, though,” Leila offers.

“I’ve only used it once, and it’ll take us off the trail, so bear with me—” She cuts off after seeing my expression.

“Don’t worry, even if we get lost, we’ll be okay,” she laughs, and places a soothing hand on my shoulder.

“I’d know my way around these woods blindfolded. ”

“Okay,” I squeak out.

The four of us start walking, Leila and Zwe leading.

“I can’t wait to take a bath,” Antonio says. He could easily walk alongside the other two, but I appreciate that he’s slowed down to a leisurely stroll so he can be beside me. “A nice bubble bath, with candles and everything.”

“That’s nice,” I mutter absentmindedly. As I watch Zwe and Leila having a lively conversation up ahead, I can’t help but feel like one of those discarded elderly pets.

What a show-off, a small voice in my head huffs. I crack my neck to shut it up. Leila is being nice. Efficient. Helpful. It’s great that she’s taking the lead and it’s no longer entirely on Zwe to formulate a plan that’ll get us out of here, that she can pitch in where I can’t. That’s a good thing.