Chaos Theory (Nerds of Paradise #2)(30)

Her laughter rang out beside him. “You’re actually counting?”

“He said to count to a hundred.”

“If it helps. I can’t hear the helicopter anymore.” Melody snorted. “Of course, I can’t hear much of anything. Are your ears still ringing? Mine are ringing.”

Will gave up counting around fifty-three. He sighed. “Yes, my ears are ringing. It’ll take a while for it to stop. It would have been nice of them to give us headphones.”

“Well, maybe. Anyhow, if the point of waiting to remove the blindfolds is so that we can’t see which way the helicopter went so we don’t have a head start in determining directions, I think it’s safe to look now.”

She had a point. He let go of her hand and reached up to pull his blindfold off. The world was fuzzy without his glasses, but he didn’t need them to see that Melody’s blindfold was already off and she was grinning at him like he was a prize.

He frowned, putting on his glasses. “You took yours off right away, didn’t you?”

“Maybe.” She shrugged, her grin coy.

“You’ve been staring at me this whole time, laughing.”

“I would never laugh at you,” she said, though her eyes told a different story.

Will sighed and let go of her hand, slipping his glasses out of his pocket and putting them on. In spite of the ringing in his ears, he could hear the twittering of birds and the rush of the breeze through the treetops. “Let’s figure out where we are.”

“Gotcha,” she said with a nod that just might have been an imitation of him.

Will unhooked the fastenings of his backpack and started shrugging it off. Melody marched away toward the trees.

“What are you doing?” he called after her.

She twisted toward him, a look of surprise on her face. “I’m trying to figure out where we are.”

Will blinked and shook his head. “By doing what? Wandering off and getting lost?”

She turned fully to face him. “By getting a sense of where we are, checking out the surroundings. Why? What are you doing?”

“Looking for a map and compass.” Five minutes, and already his patience was wearing thin. And this after he’d promised himself he wouldn’t let Melody’s lack of experience throw him off.

“Yeah, and what good is a map if you can’t figure out where you are on it because you’re unfamiliar with the landscape around you?” she fired back, crossing her arms.

Will let out a breath and scrubbed a hand over his face. He knocked his glasses askew and had to straighten them. “We can’t just go charging off into the trees without knowing which direction we’re going.”

Melody looked up, then pointed. “Sun. There. So my guess is that way is west.” She brought her arm down in an arch, pointing toward the thick forest.

Will set his backpack on the ground and unzipped a small pouch on the front. He’d felt something small and circular in there and figured Howie had put the compass where it would be easy to reach. Lucky for his pride, he was right. He pulled the compass out, flipped it open, and turned until it was oriented north.

“Compass,” he said, then held an arm out. “West.”

His pride took a blow after all as he ended up pointing to more or less the same spot of forest that Melody had. She grinned from ear-to-ear. “Shall we go now, Darling?”

Will scowled. “We still need to take advantage of this clearing and the sunlight to unload the packs and see what we’ve got.”

Melody heaved a dramatic sigh and marched back over to him. “Fine. We’ll do it your way. But aren’t you just the least bit curious to get a look at this gorgeous forest around you?”

Will crouched, setting the compass on the dirt beside his backpack. “Yes, but I’m more curious to see the tools we’ve been given to tackle it with. Aren’t you the least bit curious about what surprises Howie might have thrown in there for you?”

The spark in her eyes told him that she was. She unbuckled the straps around her middle and shrugged out of her pack, letting it drop to the ground with a thud. She plopped to the ground beside it, sat cross-legged, and started unzipping the various compartments. Will shook his head and went back to work unloading his own pack in a much more methodical way. He, at least, could approach inventorying the contents with some kind of logic. Melody was likely to lose half of the things she unpacked if she kept throwing them on the ground like so much flotsam and jetsam.

As it turned out, each backpack contained a spare pair of sturdy pants, two extra shirts, and several pairs of socks and underwear. They also contained a rain poncho, utility gloves that were also warm, a multi-function tool, matches, a small amount of rope, water purification tablets, several freeze-dried meals in foil packets, cookware and silverware, several sturdy plastic bags that could serve as canteens, an actual canteen, the all-important compass and map, and a variety of random, potentially useful objects, like duct tape. A sleeping bag was rolled tightly and fastened to the bottom of each backpack, but of course there was no pillow. Melody’s backpack contained the camera that the two of them were to share for the contest within the contest. Rounding it all off, flashing GPS devices were affixed to both backpacks, and his pack contained their emergency walkie-talkie.

“Beef stroganoff,” Melody said, holding up one of her food packets. She wrinkled up her nose.