gold rush [the wilds, toni shalifoe]

chapter 1

Day One

Leah

"Earlier this morning we made contact with your parents. We'll travel them here as quickly as possible, and the quarantine order will be lifted soon, not just for you but for all the victims, at which point you'll be free to see each other. Just to be clear, our primary goal is to conduct an investigation. There's a lot of haze surrounding your circumstances that we just want to clarify. And I cannot stress this enough, but this is just a conversation. That's all."

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To most, Hunter Boyd was the typical head cheerleader type. Long blonde hair, popular, rich family... you name it and she likely had it. She was a grade A student, but you'd never hear that out loud. Her twin brother - older by Hunter than 4 and a half minutes, not that he'd let the girl forget it - was the captain of the football team and had played with the school to win them three state championships. The Boyd twins were certainly well known in their rural Texan town.

To the few that knew her a little better, Hunter Boyd was irrational. She was constantly on edge since her break-up with her Quarterback boyfriend, Riley Black. They'd been the perfect couple until Hudson Boyd, her headstrong twin, had almost beaten Riley into a coma the night after their homecoming dance. The few that knew her better knew that that was the finally nail in the coffin of their relationship, even though they'd seemingly had the perfect high school romance.

To the one that knew her best, Hunter Boyd was a broken girl going through trauma. Hudson Boyd had started to notice the change in his sister a few weeks after she had began dating Riley Black and it didn't take him long to figure out what was happening to the blonde bombshell. She was loosing not just herself, but everything that had made Hunter her own person.

Her grades were flunking, the coach was threatening to give away her title as Head Cheerleader and her brother wasn't even sure how to approach her without seeing the ways that Hunter would automatically try to distance herself from him almost as if it was a natural instinct. That wasn't to say that Hunter didn't notice the change in her brother either. He was getting more irrational than her, going out to parties all the time and ending up in more fights than she could count on her hands.

When her parents found out why Hunter had became so irrational, that's when everything changed for the twins. Some business woman had approached their parents during their latest business conference - which the twins had a theory their parents usually made up just to get away from their children for whom they displayed little love for - telling them all about a female-only wellness retreat that she was personally attempted to scout Hunter for. It hadn't taken much convincing for Jared and Jackie to sign Hunter up for the retreat, just glad to have one less failing child to deal with.

In the space of one week, Hunter and Hudson had packed everything the younger twin would need for this "Dawn of Eve" vacation and had travelled together to the designated airport to bid their final farewell. Hunter's parents had failed to mention that there were two other girls from their high school also attending the trip but she paid little attention to them as she hugged her brother tight.

If Hunter had known what would have came next, she would never have let go of Hudson Boyd.

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"Jeanette. That was her name, I found out later. She was the only one who had came alone. The rest of us came with others. There was Toni and Martha, best friends from Minnesota. The Texans, Dot, Shelby and Hunter. There was Rachel from New York and her sister, Nora. And Fatin, of all people, from my school."

Hunter felt her earbuds get tugged out by the bubbly girl who had sat in the seat next to hers on the private jet that the ten girls had boarded that was set to take them to Hawaii. Furrowing her eyebrows as the relaxing sounds of Taylor Swift instantly were snatched away from her, Hunter turned to look at where the Asian girl was pointing towards a screen at the front of the plane.