The Narrator
5:30 a.m
There was silence after the gun was fired, except for the echoes of the sound of gunfire, and the sound of birds fleeing the site.
The first rays of the sun pierced through the horizon, dispelling the darkness of night, which was lifting away.
The shotgun fell on the ground, dropped by its handler.
The firearm was stained with blood.
It was not the blood of a bird.
It was not the blood of the children.
It was the blood of the handler.
The children, who tightly held each other, opened their eyes after those few moments of silence and were astonished that they weren't dead.
When they opened their eyes, they saw the thug perform a macabre death dance before falling dead, bleeding near his chest, and neck.
They couldn't believe that the thug's attempt to kill them backfired.
Literally, it backfired.
The shotgun was smoking, but the smoke didn't emanate from the muzzle. It emanated from somewhere near the butt and the trigger of the firearm.
The sun had fully risen, and the darkness in the forest was lifted away, even though the sun was still veiled by the thick storm clouds. It was pouring heavily, and peals of thunder reverberated throughout the jungle.
After a few minutes of seeing the thug not get up, the trio walked to his body. He lay dead. There were many holes on his face, chest, and neck. A long splinter had stabbed him in the neck.
Picking up the gun, Kirt commented, "crude, country-made weapon".
There was a hole created by a blast in the area where the chamber and receiver of the gun were. Looking at a long piece of shattered wood missing from the wooden gun's body, Kirt realized that that piece of missing wood was the splinter that stabbed the thug in his neck.
Kirt threw the gun to Timothy who caught it before it touched the ground. Timothy examined the gun and by looking at it, he knew it was haphazardly made.
The duo left the corpse where it was, and examined the bag that the thug kept near the place where Timothy was tied.
"Cocaine," said Kirt after sniffing the packets that he was able to take from the bag.
"Probably a drug dealer," chipped in Alice.
"Yeah. No wonder he has an amateur-made crude gun," said Kirt, agreeing with Alice's assessment of the thug's identity.
"Is there anything else inside?" asked Kirt.
"Nah. Nothin. Just bags of cocaine and some buckshot shells," said Timothy taking in his hand the buckshot shells that he discovered at the bottom of the bag.
"If that thing was a properly functioning gun, we'd all be dead. He was using buckshot. He could have killed all of us in one shot," said Kirt.
"Man, he must be brutal to kill someone with a buckshot shell," said Timothy.
"The weapon must have been jammed inside. That's why it somehow exploded, causing the pellets to break through the chamber and strike him," postulated Kirt as he bent over the dead body and pointed the holes on it to Timothy.
Alice didn't say anything. She was just looking at the dead body.
"Well, this won't be of any use to us," remarked Timothy, throwing the broken rifle away.
"We've gotta get back to camp," Alice said.
"How far are we from the camp anyway?" asked Kirt.
"No idea," said Timothy and Alice in unison.
"Look, there are the footprints of this dead guy. And look, there are our footprints too," said Kirt pointing excitedly to some footprints that found on the ground.
"Let's follow Kirt and my footprints till the pole by the river. From there we just head one direction, and I think we'll reach the camp," said Alice.
As they prepared to leave that place, Kirt searched for the lamp until his eyes fell on the broken lamp on the forest floor. Seeing it broken, Kirt just left the lamp behind and joined Alice and Timothy, as they tried to find their way to the pole near the river.
Felipe was sick. He was sick because he contracted the flu. He was also sick of the driver's incessant chatter. Felipe felt bad for the man's wife, who had to bear with the man's irritating character.
Tired of sitting in the car for more than two hours, Felipe got out of the vehicle to stretch. It had already dawned.
After Felipe finished stretching, he looked back to find out that he was stuck in a long traffic jam. Nobody knew how to take their vehicles out of the road after the bridge collapsed. There was no way they could.
Felipe got inside the vehicle and slammed the door shut. It seemed to him that he would be stuck in that traffic jam for eternity.
Shifaly moaned in pain as she tried getting up. Her injured stomach, which was stamped on by Basura, severely hurt. She tried sitting up, but she couldn't it. In her attempts to get up, she collapsed on the boat, shaking it. She writhed in pain as she lay on the boat. Her fingers and feet. which were crushed by Basura's feet, were sore and throbbingly painful. She screamed and cried in pain because her entire body was aching.
As she lay on the boat after waking up, with her face facing the sky, she began puking.
That was when she began gasping for air. She was choking on her own vomit.
She couldn't get up and face down to save herself from dying by choking on her own vomit.
She sensed the painful feeling of asphyxiation.
Four hours had passed. It was easy following their footsteps to the pole, for Kirt, Heinrich, and Timothy. But they had lost their way trying to go towards the camp from the pole.
They felt like they were just going around the same place over and over again.
Finally, after a long time of walking without knowing which direction they were going in, Kirt saw a ray of hope.
He could see somebody.
The three knew that someone.
"Emily!" shouted Kirt.
"Emily!" joined Alice.
"Emily!" shouted the three of them in unison.
At first, Emily Robinson, who was looking for something, searched around her to find out from which direction was her name being called.
After Emily looked around her for a while, she finally spotted the three in the distance, waving their arms and shouting her name.
As soon as she saw the trio, she hollered, "Guys I found Kirt, Alice, and Timothy! Guys, I found Kirt, Alice, and Timothy!"
The trio could hear other voices shout, "Guys Emily found Kirt, Alice, and Timothy! Guys Emily found Kirt, Alice, and Timothy!"
After a while, the trio saw Rhett, Tom, AnnSophia, Hernanda, Francisco, and Jackson gather together near where they saw Emily.
The trio waved their hands once more.
The others waved back.
Jackson, Tom, and Rhett ran towards the trio and helped them to come to the camp.
As soon as they came to the camp, AnnSophia hugged Alice, Kirt, and Heinrich.
"Where were y'all?" asked AnnSophia.
"We saw that the door was unlocked, "said Rhett.
"And we thought you were kidnapped," added Tom. Kirt looked at Timothy with a smile when Tom said that.
"We'll tell you as soon as we get on the bus," said Alice, panting.
After the trio was taken to the bus, they narrated everything they observed that night. The river was the only thing that none of the three told anyone about.
AnnSophia, like a mom, was applying first aid to Kirt's injured leg, while the trio was telling everyone about what happened.
"Don't worry Kirt, it'll only hurt a bit," said AnnSophia as she put some bandage on Kirt's leg.
Kirt injured his leg when he fell on the ground while running towards Timothy. Since he wore shorts (in order to avoid his clothes being dirtied by the mud), his leg got wounded when he fell.
As AnnSophia was bandaging poor Heinrich's leg, Rhett teased AnnSophia by calling her, "AnnSophia, the mommy of the class."
"Shut up, Rhett!" AnnSophia, turning red.
Just when Shifaly was about to die of asphyxiation, the boat was nudged by a rock which turned Shifaly's body over. Her vomit came out of her mouth and fell on the boat floor.
After the vomit fell out of her mouth, she was no longer dying because of asphyxiation. She panted and took deep breaths. She missed death once again.
Felipe was relieved after he got a call from one of his officers in La Paz, who said that his dog Amor was safely transported to his headquarters in Las Taperas.
Felipe was relieved. Sitting in that vehicle, he pulled out a picture of Amor (when he was a puppy) and looked at it with a smile, thinking of the memories that he and Nacho have had with the dog.
Amor was all grown up and looked bigger than how he looked in that picture which Felipe was holding. Being separated from Felipe because of the jam, Amor would jump with joy, wagging his tail at 90 km/h when he would see Felipe. Amor was only one and a half years old. He was not a fully grown dog, neither was he a tiny pup.
Felipe readied himself for all the licking and the jumps that he would receive from the over-excited dog as soon as he sees Amor in Las Taperas. No matter how bad Felipe's day was, seeing Amor always made Felipe smile.
Sanchez Roderigo was the onlyworker at La Abuela De Princesa Irene who did not drink at the officer's birthday party. Because Roderigo was someone who was taken advantage of by everyone at the office, all his colleagues put their load on Roderigo's head, while they lay on their beds at home, hungover from excessive indulgence.
Sanchez was exhausted. Sitting on his chair, he stared at the big screen on the wall. The Dam Stress Indicator lights have been red for six months on that screen. It wasn't a good sign, but the dam seemed to tolerate a great amount of stress.
Grabbing a cup of coffee, which he prepared to help him stay up, Roderigo walked to the window of his office and observed La Abuela De Princesa Irene.
He saw the dam's two embankments. The main embankment had gates which controlled the amount of water going downstream while forming a reservoir. The tall embankment adjacent to the main embankment had no gates because the purpose of that tall embankment was to keep all the water away from flowing down Princesa's old course.
As he observed the dam, he thought about the 'story of the Israelis' which was a trending topic in office discussions.
This is what the officers called 'The Story Of The Israelis':
Office legend has it that in the year 1960, an Israeli company called 'Mattityahu, Benyamin, and Iyov' was hired by the Bolivian government to work with Simon Aristizábal Bolivar in managing the Abuela De Princesa Irene dam and reservoir. After they were given the work, suspicious of the dam's strength, the Israeli company began to write a report on the dam. The exact contents of the report were not known, but rumor has it that the report stated that the dam was unsafe to be operating because of fundamental issues in the way it was built. The report demanded that the dam be replaced or reconstructed as soon as possible many decades before the date that Simon and his engineers had set as the day when the dam would stop function optimally.
Simon took offense at the report, rumors say, and exploited the Anti-Israeli sentiment during that time to term the Company's officials as spies of the Mossad. Everyone in that Israeli company was deported and Simon, according to rumors, had the report burned and shredded. The rumors say that Simon wanted to preserve his title as Bolivia's ingenious potamologist and engineering geologist, and for that reason, he destroyed all copies of the report after getting the Israelis deported from Bolivia. He destroyed them because, according to rumors, he prized his ego above the safety of millions of Bolivians.