“So do I work by myself or pick a group?”
“You work with the people on your floor.” I snap my head to him. “It’s both men and women. This is a large group exercise for when we do larger evacuations. And unfortunately there have been far too many of those in recent history. Yes, the floor leaders are in charge of the exercise.” He answers my unasked question.
Perfect.
I walk over to where Audrina and the rest of our floor is standing waiting to get on the course. In the light of day and not in the middle of running the course I can see different rope ladders and access points to each part of the course. So I can actually come out here and take the time to figure out each course piece, that is when I get the time. I look forward to that.
“Hey Newbie, up here with me.” A very large guy standing next to Wyatt calls over to me.
“Put her in the back where she belongs. Then she can’t hold us up.” Audrina throws over her shoulder at him.
“That’s the dumbest thing I have ever heard. First, we don’t put newbies in the back especially when we don’t know all of their skills. Second, this newbie happens to be the most agile person on ropes I have ever seen and should be one of the first people to go. You weren’t at trials, you didn’t see what her skills were at all, be petty and judgy later. We need to complete this course in record time, I’m done losing to Jack and his crew by seconds.” He must be the male lead on our floor for Audrina to not have a snarky response to him informing her I’m good at something.
“Whatever, if we lose this challenge because she’s here, I’m going to blame you and you both can do the punishment together for the whole team.” “Suits me.” Tall guy says. “Name’s John, but everyone calls me ‘Tracker.’ We have to get all 20 of us across and down in the shortest amount of time. We have been doing training drills for a few weeks, stick close to me, you seem to read the room pretty well. Any suggestions, I’ll take them, but watch first to gather intel.”
“Got it.” I ignore Audrina, the best I can. She’s on my team and eventually we are going to be forced to work together, but at least for now, there are so many people and she is in her element of being in charge and verbalizing her game plan. I do not matter enough for her attention since Tracker seems to have taken me under his wing. Unfortunately, listening to her, I understand why she’s in her position. She’s at least smart and knows what she’s doing.
As a group we scale these small metal pegs hammered into the uprights. The pegs are so tiny, even my feet are going to have a hard time fitting quickly. I don’t know how Wyatt, Tracker and some of these other guys are going to manage to move up quickly. From there we are scaling across the rope bridge that has a single rope for feet and single rope for hands and the bars in between to keep them about seven feet apart. If we had children with us on the evacuation, there is no way any of us would choose this bridge style. I say as much to Tracker.
“Do we assume we have children or elderly in these exercises? Or so we assume everyone can traverse this setup since it wouldn’t be practical for those demographics?” I ask the back of Tracker’s head while our group moves forward.
“We should always assume the worst case scenario, that means children, elderly, sick, injured, every type of person we could come across. Why do you ask?”
“In a real life situation, there is no way one of us is going to set a bridge like this, even in the worst situation, if we have children or injured people, they are going to need to be carried across. I am the smallest person here and I have done this alone twice this week and I can barely touch both ropes at the same time, that makes me slower. An untrained person would be worse and whatever we were evacuating from would probably capture or kill us. Do we go single file or can the rope handle more than one at a time?”
