Page 1 of The Fighter
PROLOGUE
The Academy
Raven
My legs were shaking from exhaustion and my jaw was shivering from the ice-cold water. All around me, bigger and stronger recruits were struggling, too.
Half an hour ago, we had been asleep. Our bodies were burned out from days of endless torturous stress, tests, and severe sleep deprivation. The desperation in the eyes of the men around me reflected how I felt myself. It had been quarter to midnight when we were allowed to go to bed. Fifty-three minutes later, the nightmare had begun again when they woke us up with loud sirens. Ninety-seven of us were left from the original two hundred and fifty recruits that had been given the chance to try out for a spot at the academy. Now we were facing the last test, which was simple in nature. We had to get out of the lake and press through the chain of faceless men standing in front of us. If we didn’t secure one of the fifty red sticks in the box that the masked men were guarding, we would be packing our bags and leaving the academy. Only the fifty strongest recruits got to stay.
I am getting one of those sticks!
As the only woman, I wasn’t just fighting for myself but for any woman who dreamed of becoming a police officer. This was my chance to prove that we had what it took. Three times I’d made it onto the shore already. Each time, the chain of masked men had pushed and thrown me back in the water.
It was October, past midnight, and at least forty of the red sticks had been taken by now. The desperation in me and the other recruits still in the water was tangible. Screams, growls, and roars filled the air as the men getting pushed off the shore landed on other recruits that sunk deeper into the muddy, cold water.
Come on, Raven, get out of the water, now!
“What are you weaklings waiting for? No one is forcing you to do this. Just give up and we’ll take you inside to get a warm shower and some sleep. Doesn’t that sound nice? The police force doesn’t need you. We only need the strongest, and that’s clearly not you,” one of the men on the shore shouted in one of his constant attacks on our psyche. “Is this really worth dying for? You know you’ll either drown or die of hypothermia if you don’t make it out of that water fast.”
The sound of the faceless men laughing triggered me. I was dying after only ten days at the police academy, and they thought it was funny. I wanted to punch them in their faces and make them suffer as much as I was suffering.
More frozen recruits clawed their way onto the shore only to get into desperate fights with the masked men on the shore.
When one of the recruits tore off a mask from the man he’d been fighting, I saw the rage on the now un-masked man. He shouted, “You fucking asshole” at the recruit, who triumphantly held up the red stick he had secured.
“Get him a blanket,” someone else shouted and pointed the victorious recruit to a large tent.
“Only nine more sticks left and fifty-two of you are still in the water. Why don’t you join the four who gave up? They’re in the warm tent sipping hot cocoa now. There’s no shame in quitting when you’re simply not good enough. You always knew that only twenty percent make it through the initial two hell weeks, and you didn’t really think you would be one of them, did you? Why go through all that trouble and pain when you might as well quit now?”
I blocked him out. I hadn’t suffered through the other thirteen days of physical and mental torture to give up now.Think, Raven, think!
“We have to work together,” I called out to the three large recruits closest to me. Like me they were smeared in mud from failed attempts at getting through the chain of men on the shore, and their jaws were shivering. “We have to pick the weakest link and go at him together. It’s the only way.”
“Stay away from me,” one of them hissed, while another pushed past me muttering, “You shouldn’t be here anyway.”
“You two, follow me,” the largest of them ordered and the three of them moved to the side, forming an alliance and targeting the smallest guy on the flank of the shore.
I couldn’t feel my toes, my teeth were chattering, and seeing them go ahead with my plan without me made me furious.
Don’t get mad, get even.How many times had my dad told me that?Assess, plan, attack.
My teeth were chattering even worse as I looked around, searching for an alternate route to the box with sticks, but the instructor had specifically told us the only way was through the defenders. “We have fenced in the area around you. Don’t make the mistake of trying to dig your way under the fence. Trust me, each year we find dead students who ran out of oxygen or got tangled up in the fence and died that way.”
But what if he had been lying? What if I could find a hole in the fence?
With the three recruits attracting attention on the shore, I moved backward and out of the light from the projectors that were shining down on us recruits in the water. It was counterintuitive to lower my body further into the ice-cold water when all I wanted was to get out, but after taking three deep inhalations, I dived and swam to get away from the masked men standing guard on the shore.
My lungs were hurting and every muscle in my body screamed for oxygen. I kept my eyes closed to protect them from the muddy water and counted on my sense of direction to pull this off.
Every second I was expecting to touch a net of some kind.Where is it? Am I going in the right direction?Come on, just a little longer.
Feeling like I was about to pass out, I had no choice but to break the surface in a greedy gasp for air. It was hard not to laugh with relief when I saw that the shore was only a few feet away. There was no net to keep us in. It had all been a bunch of bullshit. It felt like a mile to the shore when I forced my tired legs and arms to do a few more swimming strokes to get there.
Come on, Raven! Hurry or there will be no more red sticks left. Get your ass out of the water. Do it, do it, do it!
I was pumping myself up while listening to the men shouting and fighting further down the shore.
As I crawled out of the water, my white t-shirt and pajama pants weighed a ton. Even with the large spots of mud on the fabric, the white color still worked against me and so did the squeaky sound my wet shoes were making. Without hesitating, I stripped down to my black sports bra and panties before running barefoot to where the masked men were protecting the red sticks. My brown skin worked to camouflage me in the darkness.
