Scene 21 — Cal

Cal and Lindsey moved quickly into the mess hall and crossed the large open area that presumably had once been the dining hall to enter the kitchen. Cal looked around and quickly realized that, as always, this wasn’t as simple as it might have appeared initially.

The appliances were quite old, probably ‘80s vintage, and designed to cook large meals for hundreds of hungry campers. At least they appeared to have been freshly cleaned. The cookware was similarly aged, all metal pots, nothing non-stick or even cast iron, as well as similarly sized for large scale meal preparation, not ideal for making a high quality meal for three people. The most striking thing, however, was that it appeared the organizers had left a huge amount of canned food that looked as if it was leftover from when this place was still a boy scout camp. There were hundreds of big No. 10 cans, some with faded labels, some simply had black stamps indicating their contents and some were not labeled at all. There were also many boxes of dried food on shelves along the wall, sort of an industrial sized pantry. The only modern thing in the whole place aside from the cameras, he noted, was a digital clock counting down; it now read 28:43. That must be their remaining time.

Cal walked to a large commercial refrigerator and looked inside. There were a couple items but it was sparse: some milk, cheese, cream, yogurt and a few other perishable goods. He also noticed there was a small basket with some fresh produce tucked on a pantry shelf. Next he began going through the drawers under the counter, they were surprisingly empty. The realization dawned on him: the organizers had left hardly any cookware to use. ‘That tracks,’ he thought to himself. He looked at the timer, they had just over 27 minutes left, time to get to work.

“What do you think?” Cal asked Lindsey, who had been doing a similar investigation of what they had to work with.

“Aside from that you’re a jerk,” she answered icily, “I think the big challenge here is just getting something reasonable cooked in the time allotted. There’s so much food just finding something that makes a reasonable dish will be tough.”

Cal gave her a sour look. He was tired of the continued attacks and unnecessary cruelty every time she opened her mouth. He was aware he’d made an error in judgement but he’d apologized and they needed to refocus on the game. Not like she was exactly perfect either - she was the one who got the penalty. He thought about sarcastically pointing out Lindsey was repeating their prior mistake of playing it safe but decided he should try to be the bigger person for the sake of their chances.

“Alright, let’s see what we can find,” he said. The pair began looking through the enormous pantry for options.