Spy School: Danger is my Middle Name

Arrival at the Tribe

---POV Switch to Benjamin Ripley---

When Trixie first pushed me off, I had to reconsider some of my life choices.

First of all, how did I get into this situation? 

When had my fate led me to become friends with a team of crime-fighting psychopaths that pushed their comrades off planes?

What did Trixie think throwing me off a plane would accomplish?

What would happen to Erica if I died in this situation?

And most of all, how the heck do you work this parachute??!!!!

I fumbled with the straps on my backpack, looking for something to pull. I remember Trixie saying that you had to use your right hand to find the rough rope, and that was the parachute trigger. My right hand worked around the side of the backpack, only to grab a Powerade® Zero bottle that was half full.

Cursing under my breath, I started to desperately grab random things from my backpack and pull them, watching as the distance between me and the terrain grew smaller and smaller. Just when I thought there wasn't any distance left until I went splat, my hand caught a strap.

Using lightning-fast reflexes fueled by my adrenaline, I pulled the trigger, folded my body into a random position, then hoped for the best. Three seconds later, I was gracefully descending down onto the forest floor.

I sighed in relief, only to get smacked in the face with a tree branch. Then another tree branch. Then a leaf. Then a stick. Then, the tree trunk. And finally, after the beat down, I collapsed in a heap on the ground, groaning in pain.

"I...made...it," I stuttered, feeling my head spin. A giant Heliconia leaf brushed against my face. 

After blacking out for a while, I remembered waking up, feeling some warmth against my face, then flinging my eyes open in alarm to find Erica Hale standing right above me.

"Wh--" I managed to say before she slapped a muffle onto my mouth.

"Be quiet!" she hissed, slowly taking off the muffle. "There are enemy agents around here!"

"Enemy agents?" I whispered. "We're in the middle of a remote island!"

"I'm kidding," Erica laughed, helping me up. "There's no way that I would skydive down in the middle of the day if I knew enemy agents were around here. After all, I would be easier to spot than an African Elephant."

I took a look around our location. "Looks like we're stranded somewhere on this giant piece of land. Why'd you skydive down here with me anyway?"

Erica hesitated for less than a millisecond, which, for her, was like a whole day. "I needed to lead you to our landing area," she covered really quickly. "You'd be lost without a guide."

"Sure," I said, pushing past thick foilage. "Which way are we heading?"

"That way," Erica pointed to a giant tree. "Towards the Ceiba pentandra."

"You memorized the scientific name for all the trees in this rainforest?" I asked. "How long did that take?"

"About three days," she said casually. "I can memorize entire books, remember? All I had to do was read an encyclopedia."

I was about to reply, but something hard on the forest floor tripped me before I could. Falling onto the ground (which didn't help my headache), I coughed up some dirt and took a look at the item my foot had caught onto.

Surprisingly, it was a man-made object. A stone, triangle-shaped and sharpened, laid on the ground, standing out from all the green plants around it.

"That's an arrowhead," Erica immediately said. "Looks like we may have run into a foreign tribe that lives here. Actually, that makes sense. Uninhabited land is basically free real estate for tribal people. After all, there's nobody to destroy their property around them."

"So...we're near a Native American tribe?" I concluded.

"Yep," Erica said. "And unfortunately, it looks like we're not the only visitors here. There's a camera visor littered on the floor over there. I think there may be a TV crew over here coming to record something...probably a documentary."

"So we can potentially get famous if we get caught on tape?" was the first comment that came to my mind, but I decided not to say such foolish phrases. Eventually, I decided on just replying with "So what do we do?"

"We try to avoid the cameras," she said. "And get over to the landing areas. Not that hard, seeing we're spies and we're built to avoid being caught on the footage. Also, I doubt they would be interested in putting tape of two teenagers talking in a tribal documentary."

I looked down at my Nerds Rule shirt. "Yeah, and our sense of fashion is nowhere near that either."

We kept walking, and my eyes never left the ground around us. In Survival 101 back at the Academy, we had learned to watch for all poisonous plants. One poke in the wrong spot from a thorn, and you could be dead.

Suddenly, the snap of a twig to our right made our heads turn instinctively. My eyes caught the sight of a ponytail trailing a human, who was streaking through the woods like a deer. The person stopped after a few seconds, and I took in some of the characteristics.

The girl had a lithe body, carved with muscle and years of survival skills. The wild edge was in her eyes, and she immediately spotted us without even trying. Erica's neon shirt didn't help. 

When she saw Erica, the girl narrowed her eyes. Meanwhile, the girl's eyes widened when she moved her gaze to me, and she dropped the spear in her hand in surprise.

"It's a guy!" she shouted, flinging a net at my face. Something tangled my limbs into a mess of non-coordination, and the next thing I knew, I was being carried southward in a giant mess of ropes.

"It's a guy?" I mumbled as a rope ground against my cheek. "What's that supposed to mean? Erica?"

I turned my head to the right and found the space empty. Alarmingly, I faced the path behind me where I and my spy-in-partner had been, and my sight fell on the most horrifying thing I had ever witnessed in my life.

Erica Hale laid on the ground, the ground around her died red. A spear sprouted out from her heart.

And that's when I blacked out again.