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Overview
They came on a mission of mercy, but now they’re in a fight for their lives.
High schooler Will Peterson and three friends journeyed to Central America to help rebuild a school. In a poor, secluded mountain village, they won the hearts of the local people with their energy and kindness.
But in one sudden moment, everything went horribly wrong. A revolution swept the country. Now, guns and terror are everywhere—and Americans are being targeted as the first to die.
Will and his friends have got to get out fast. But streets full of killers . . .hills patrolled by armies . . . and a jungle rife with danger stand between them and the border. Their one hope of escape lies with a veteran warrior who has lost his faith and may betray them at any moment. Their one dream is to reach freedom and safety and home.
If they can just survive.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781401688127 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nelson, Thomas, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 08/20/2013 |
| Sold by: | HarperCollins Publishing |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 405,244 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 13 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Andrew Klavan is an award-winning writer, screenwriter, and media commentator. An internationally bestselling novelist and two-time Edgar Award-winner, Klavan is also the host of a popular podcast on DailyWire.com, The Andrew Klavan Show. His work has been made into films starring Clint Eastwood, Michael Douglas, and Michael Caine. His essays on politics, religion, and culture have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and elsewhere.
Read an Excerpt
IF WE SURVIVE
By ANDREW KLAVAN
Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2012 Andrew KlavanAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4016-8812-7
Chapter One
There were five of us before the killing started. We had come to Costa Verdes to build a wall.It was a poor country. A jungle country. A small country set on that narrow, twisting bridge of land that links Mexico to Colombia: Central America. The village we were in—Santiago—was a nothing of a place. Just a church in a flagstone plaza. A three-story-tall cantina-slash-hotel. A narrow street of shops and market stalls. And houses—little cottages really—trailing away up the road and into the mountains.
There were a lot of mountains in Costa Verdes. There were mountains everywhere, as far as the eye could see. They rose against the pale-blue sky in the morning, hunkered under black thunderclouds in the afternoon, and stood silhouetted beneath the stars at night. They were covered with forest, deep beryl green up close, blue-gray in the distance. And there was always mist rising out of the trees, spreading over the peaks and covering the horizon with an aura of mystery.
As for the wall we were building here in the village, it was the wall of a school—the only school for miles around. Not only the kids in the village used it, but all the kids from the farms and plantations on the nearby slopes: two dozen kids, maybe more, and of all ages. The wall had been destroyed somehow—I wasn't sure how exactly. Los volcanes, the natives kept telling us. The volcanoes. But that didn't make any sense. The only volcano I could see was miles and miles in the distance. I could only just make out its strange, flattened top, only just distinguish the trail of smoke that sometimes drifted from its ragged crater to blend with the mist hanging all around it. I didn't understand how "volcanoes" could have turned the school wall to rubble.
But rubble is what it was when we got there. And the school hadn't been much to begin with either. It was just a rectangular box made of cinder blocks with a long bench on each side for the kids to sit on, and a table and a blackboard up front for the teacher. Pretty pitiful when I compared it to my own school back home in California: Grove High, with its corridors and classrooms, its laboratories and library, its huge gym and football field and track and so on. Here in the Santiago cinder-block school, the kids barely had books to read and stuff to write with. Seriously: they used half pencils—pencils broken in half so there'd be enough to go around. They wrote on these little ragged notebooks, the blue covers nearly worn away, the pages full even at the borders because they had to use every inch of blank space they could find.
That's what it was like when they went to school, but they couldn't go much now with the wall demolished and one of the benches upside down on the floor amid the debris. Three cinder-block walls and a pile of gravel where the fourth one used to be—that was their schoolhouse now. Los volcanes. Whatever. We came to rebuild the place.
It was a church project. Or a church-slash-school project, to be more precise. The villagers here were too poor to buy the wall material themselves, and the local men were too busy working for their daily bread to take time to put the schoolhouse back together. So our church had taken up a collection for the cinder blocks and tools and mortar and so on, and then called for volunteers to come down here for a week or so during the summer break and slap the thing back up so the kids could get some kind of education. Grove High put up posters about the mission too, and Principal Hagen mentioned it during an assembly. In the end, some of us joined up in the name of Christian outreach and some of us came to get the Public Service credits we needed for graduation. Some of us had our own reasons too. Well, I guess all of us had our own reasons, when it comes down to it.
* * *
So who were we?
Well, let's see, there was Pastor Ron, first of all. Ron Collins, the associate minister at our church. He was a small, thin guy, with a bland, friendly face, eyes blinking out from behind his thick dark-rimmed glasses. He was young, mild-mannered, enthusiastic. Maybe a little too enthusiastic sometimes, if you ask me. Trying too hard to make things exciting and interesting to his teenage traveling companions. You may know the type. Always wanting everyone to think everything was fun, fun, fun—and then getting sort of quietly disgruntled and annoyed when anyone thought it was not, not, not. But I don't want to be unfair to him: he was a good guy, he really was. He always had time to listen to you and help you out if you had a problem. And his sermons were a lot more intelligent and interesting than the ones given by the head pastor, Pastor Francis. It's just that Pastor Ron was sometimes a little bit ... clueless, I guess you'd say.
I'll give you an example. Once, shortly after we arrived in the village, Pastor Ron saw a little kid threatening a bigger kid with a stick. The little kid had his back against a cottage wall. The big kid—a big, fat hulking monster of a guy—was hovering over him, his hands balled into fists and his face darkening like a rain cloud. The little guy was holding a stick in front of him with both hands. He was so scared, you could see the stick vibrating as his hands shook.
Now, see, to me, it was pretty clear that the little kid was defending himself against the big kid in the only way he knew how. But Pastor Ron went hurrying over to the two of them and quickly pulled the stick out of his hands.
"No, no, mi amigo," Pastor Ron said in his flat, American-accented Spanish.
He knelt down between the boys and put a hand on a shoulder of each. He began talking to them in the quiet, patient, friendly way he had. I don't speak much Spanish myself, but I could make out some of what he was saying. He was telling the boys how wrong it was to do violence, and how it was especially dangerous to fight with sticks because you could take someone's eye out and leave him blind. He said the boys had to learn to be friends and give up fighting ... and so on.
"Comprendez, amigos?" he asked. Do you understand, my friends?
The boys nodded, their big round eyes staring into the friendly stranger's face.
"Bueno," said Pastor Ron.
He patted them on the shoulders and stood up. And looking very satisfied with himself, he walked off to our tents, carrying the stick with him.
You can probably guess what happened then. In fact, I'm sure you can. The minute Pastor Ron ducked into our tent and was out of sight, the big kid—seeing the little kid had lost his only means of defense—hauled off and punched that poor little mite so hard, the boy literally left his feet before he thumped down to the ground in a cloud of brown dust. Man, that punch even made me see stars and hear the birdies sing, and I was standing nearly twenty yards away.
Happy then, the big kid went tromping off down the road, leaving the little kid sitting in the dirt, sobbing and rubbing his eyes with his fists.
That's all I'm saying about Pastor Ron. Nice guy. Good intentions. Just a little clueless, that's all.
* * *
Then there was Nicki—Nicki Wilson. Or—as I sometimes called her secretly, in my own thoughts—High School Barbie. Which was maybe a little unfair. I mean, Nicki had a lot of sweetness to her, she really did. And she was glamorous: pretty in a sort of flashy way with wavy blond-brown hair and big, deep-blue eyes that could blink innocently at you and send your heart reeling. Her makeup was always perfect, even out there in the middle of nowhere. Her clothes likewise were always neat and elegant, even in the wilting heat of noon before the thunderstorms started. When she walked up the little dirt path to our worksite, the people of Santiago actually stopped and stared at her with awe, as if she were a visiting princess or something. The little girls in the village—they loved her especially. And she was great with them, always ready to sit down with them on a bench and show them how to decorate their clothes with ribbons and rhinestones she had with her or how to tie up their hair in different ways.
So Nicki was sweet like that, but she was also just a little bit ... what's the word I want? Shallow, I guess. She was seven teen, had just finished eleventh grade, and had left her Public Service credits till the last minute. She had come on this mission to Costa Verdes, as I overheard her say once, because she just couldn't stand the horror of having to waste her senior year doing some dreary something-or-other in a homeless shelter when everyone knew twelfth grade was supposed to be one long party.
She wasn't a lot of help with the wall either. It was a hard job. We had to dig a huge pit for the old debris, clear the rubble away, and cover it over. Then we had to haul the cinder blocks up the hill from the plaza where the truck had left them. We had to reset the big footer in the foundation, mix the mortar in a wheelbarrow, and so forth. And Nicki—well, just being honest here: she had a tendency to dog it a little, if you know what I mean. She'd sort of delicately lay some mortar on top of one of the blocks, wrinkling her nose at the yucky stuff as if it were a dead animal and handling the trowel as if it were the ten-foot pole she didn't want to touch it with. And then, the first second she thought she could get away with it, she'd heave a humongous sigh, blowing a stray curl off her pretty forehead, and she'd say, "I have to take a break! I'm just exhausted!"
On top of that, she had absolutely zero appreciation for how blessed we Americans are—you know, how nice our homes are, even the small ones, how much we have, even when we think we don't have that much. The people in Santiago—they had nothing. I mean, nothing. Their houses were clay boxes roofed in thatch. Most of them didn't have electricity or running water. The dads worked in the fields all day and the moms literally had to do the laundry at the river, down on their knees, scrubbing the clothes in the water.
"How could anyone live this way?" I once heard Nicki whisper under her breath. "You can't even get online!"
And okay, it was sort of weird—our cell phones didn't work and the Internet was only available at the cantina. We were all suffering Facebook withdrawal. But it didn't occur to Nicki that a whole lot of the world lives like that, you know. In fact, we in America, with all the stuff and gadgets and connections we have, we're the exceptions, the lucky ones—oh, and by the way, most of us didn't have a lot to do with making that happen.
Listen, I don't want to be all critical and pick on Nicki, because as I said, she was a sweet girl really, with a true depth of kindness in her ... but I do have to tell this one story on her just because it makes me laugh.
One day, toward the end of our visit, when the wall was just about finished, the natives invited us to a ceremony. This was a big compliment—an honor really. The people of Costa Verdes are Christians—Catholics—but the country's original religion is some kind of ancient Mayan thing, and it still survives under the surface of the culture. That is, the people go to the church in the plaza every Sunday and all, but they still have a couple of festivals and ceremonies from the old days—part of that religion they surrendered when the Spanish explorers came and converted them.
Most of the time, they didn't let strangers come to these ceremonies. But I guess they were grateful to us for fixing their school and all, so they invited us along. And let me tell you, it was cool. I mean, hypercool, cool to the magnitude of awesome. We all gathered very solemnly in this cave—really, a cave hidden under vegetation in a side of one of the mountains. We sat against the cave wall and the only light was the flickering flame from a torch this old priest was carrying. The priest looked like he was about two hundred years old, he was so stooped and brown and wrinkled. He moved around the cave in front of us, lighting a bunch of candles with his torch so that the whole place glowed with this sort of wavering yellow light.
Then this big wooden statue was carried in by two of the men from the village. A carved, painted statue of some sort of grinning skeleton man. Very cool. Like some kind of Batman villain. I guess he was the god they were worshipping.
The men set the statue in the center of the cave. Then the priest—and I swear I'm not making this up—gave the god a cigar to smoke. No, really. He stuck the cigar in the god's grinning mouth and lit it for him with one of the candles! Then, when the god was comfortably enjoying a smoke, the priest moved around among the candles, swinging this balled cloth that spread a sweet smell everywhere like incense. And all the people clapped and sang and chanted, with their eyes shining and their faces looking kind of rapt and devout and happy. Very, very, very cool. Made me wish we did stuff like that in our church sometimes! Well, not really. But you know what I mean.
So anyway, this whole ancient, sacred ceremony went on, with all of us Americans being honored by being allowed to watch. And there we were, in this mystical cave full of candles and incense and chanting people. And finally, when it was over, the priest blew out the candles one by one, and the cave sank into a blackness that you could never describe, never even imagine, just a complete, lightless nothingness full of the fading echoes of the people's prayers. Then silence. Total darkness. Total silence.
And out of that silent darkness came Nicki's voice—a sort of lazy, complaining whine.
"I am in such a shopping mood today!" she said.
I nearly pitched forward onto my face laughing. That was Nicki all over, it really was. The natives honored us by sharing their most ancient secrets, and all she could think about was scoring a new pink T at A&F!
Sweet girl, just ... shallow.
* * *
And then there was Jim Nolan. And you know the old expression, "If you can't say something nice about someone, don't say anything at all"?
Well, I haven't got much to say about Jim Nolan.
Jim was the smartest person in the universe—if, that is, the universe were his own imagination—which I think he believed it was. Jim was sixteen. Tall, very skinny, stoop-shouldered. Had kind of bugged-out eyes and very thin lips that he always seemed to be pressing together in disapproval of something. He really did know a lot—or he thought he did, anyway—about history and books and so forth. And whenever anyone said anything about practically anything, he was only too willing to correct them about it and give them a lecture on what he thought was the truth of the matter.
"We—we Americans, I mean—we destroyed this country, that's the fact of it," I heard him say once.
I was coming down the hill after helping Pastor Ron and the others drag tarps over our building materials in preparation for the afternoon storms. I heard Jim talking before I saw him.
"General Benitez was a great reformer," Jim went on. "There's just no question he would have redistributed the land more fairly. It's only because our CIA took it upon themselves to come in here and help the reactionaries overthrow him that you continue to have the poverty and unfairness you have today!"
Typical Jim. All the poverty and misery in the world was America's fault. Just as it never occurred to Nicki that poverty and misery were the default mode of the planet and we should be grateful for what we had, it never occurred to Jim that we didn't cause that poverty and misery; it was there long before we got here.
Anyway ... I heard him talking like that and I came around a stand of thick-trunked evergreen trees and then I saw him. He was standing in a little clearing with a group of men. The men were sitting on the ground and Jim was standing over them as if he were a professor giving them an open-air lecture. He was pointing a finger at them as he spoke, driving his ideas home as the words tumbled out of him.
The men? They just sat there, gazing up at him with dull eyes. One of them I noticed looked particularly mean. A lean, broad-shouldered guy in his thirties. He had a craggy face, weatherworn and somber. A thin mustache, a cigarette dangling from the full red lips underneath. His eyes looked to me to be almost black. And the way he was looking up at Jim—with a sort of droll, distant, disdainful humor—well, it was the way someone might look at a spider who was just disgusting enough to hold his attention for a few seconds before he stepped on it.
That guy—that guy with the mean eyes? That was Mendoza, it turned out. I would see him again. Hanging out around the edges of the village. Talking to some of the men there. Talking to Pastor Ron once, as if they were having a philosophical debate of some kind.
And of course later, in the cantina, with his gun.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from IF WE SURVIVE by ANDREW KLAVAN Copyright © 2012 by Andrew Klavan. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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