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.Ricky, run! He pushed his son out of the way and kicked at the running body coming at them.His instep made contact with the bone of the man's skull, and the man's body crumpled to the ground, inert.Dad! Ricky was calling him from the trail.He turned to follow the voice.About to run, he felt a crack on his head and his knees giving way.That was the last thing he felt.Eight—La AuroraRicky had run through the dark down the mountain like a bat guided by an instinct for flight that was more like love than sonar.He thought of his mother as the pack bounced on his back and explosions rocked the night behind him.Fear flooded his mind, and a black cave opened in his chest that was his heart exploding.He tripped and fell headlong down a chasm, landing in a stream.There he crawled between the rocks and nursed his chin where he'd landed and had opened a bleeding gash on it.He didn't want to think.He didn't want to know.Up there, back at the mountain hut, he'd left his childhood behind.In a semi-conscious dream state, he saw his mother.She was dressed in a gown and smiled at him from behind a kitchen counter in the house in Florida.There were no more explosions.Nobody was coming after him.A hazy, dim light first broke above him, changing the black to grey, and then rays of sunlight shone through the branches of oak and encenillo and the vines of the lianas draped throughout the canopy.He felt his chin.The bleeding had stopped and a scab of crusted blood lay beneath his fingertips.He could move his legs, and he propped himself up on his arms and shifted his weight.The pack was there beside him.He opened it and felt for the tablet.The lines of the hieroglyphs, the smooth, cold stone grounded him with calm resolve.He took it out and held it up.In the sunlight it seemed to change its color.He could almost see the reclining king with the headdress turn to face him in recognition.By mid-morning he could sit up unsupported, and a few minutes later he'd sipped some water from the stream that ran between the large boulders.The fact that he was alive must mean something to someone.His father had fallen saving him from the men with the hovering choppers.But it was all like a dream.He’d go back.Al was sure to be there having coffee with Evelio and Noah.It had all been an illusion of his own distorted, teenaged imaginings, a product of too many video games in his younger days.He wanted it to be that, but he knew.Al was gone.He knew it.Where would he go, how could he get home, where was home now?Without his Dad, a secret called to him from the stone tablet and the figure carved on it, a knowledge that there was a bigger destiny in store for him than he had ever imagined or accepted.As if in confirmation, he found a spotted newt on the top of a rock, nestled in moss.He looked at its dead black eyes as it stared at him.Okay.I'm communicating with newts now.He spoke aloud to himself, stepping away from the stream and picking his way through the boulders, swinging the daypack with the tablet in it onto his back again.As he hiked back up the mountain, the blackness that had emptied his heart slowly lifted, and he felt a new strength surge through his body.He wasn't sure what it was, but he knew that nothing could hurt him on this day.Then he remembered.It was his mother's birthday.Al and he had planned on celebrating it with a rainforest hike up to the Continental Divide where they would have dropped gifts for her towards the Atlantic and Pacific, mingling the sounds of their voices with the mists swirling towards the four corners of the planet.It was his idea.Now it would never happen.In a way he was glad.He would keep the tablet instead of letting it go into the jungle forever in her name.The hut was gone, just a blackened lump of something which might have been a tank of propane gas.The ground around it was black, and there was no sign of life, human or otherwise, in the surrounding fields.A stench of something burnt filled the air, incongruous with the blue sky that heralded a beautiful day.Ricky walked around, kicking at the ground for clues of his father's whereabouts, a cigarette pack, a piece of cardboard packaging.Puddles of water mixed with reddish gore.Death and destruction filled his nostrils until he had to get away.Mom! He yelled at the top of his lungs.Dad!He waited for an answer back.There was nothing except the rasping noise of tree beetles scratching in the bark of the trees.He hiked down the mountain to the main road and caught a ride with a man on a motorcycle, who said he was headed for Juchintla.The wind stung his eyes as he sat behind the cyclist with an unlikely pompadour of greased black hair and a too small leather jacket.They passed buses full of tourists and slow moving trucks bearing brand names of cheeses and toilet paper.Life proceeded as if nothing had happened on the mountain.The man parked the motorcycle in the town center by the taxi rank.Ricky slipped off the back.He walked up the hill to the hotel and sat on the concrete embankment beside the entrance and waited.He couldn't go to the police, couldn't tell anyone what had happened to him for fear of tripping some guide wires of intelligence leading back to the men who had come in the night in those air ships.They had appeared so suddenly.Like ghosts slipping around invisibly.Didn't Noah say they had super stealth airplanes? That entailed a level of sophistication that meant Ricky ought to lay as low as possible.On the other hand, he needed help.The trick was getting through to the right people, people like Evelio and Noah.An old scrap of a flyer went sailing by out of a car window.Reflexively, he ran after it and caught it.It was an advertisement for a zip line adventure tour.The Super Tarzan Jungle Canopy Ride.Not so long ago he would have begged for the chance to go on something like that.But he didn't feel sorry for himself.The sun was out and it felt good to be warming up in it.Cars were going by.School age kids hiked up and down the hill.It must have been the time for lunch.He felt like he should be hungry, but he wasn't.The absence of his father was such a drain on his heart he could barely move, but if he didn't keep moving he didn't stand a chance of finding out what had happened to him.He didn't even have time to be scared.He was too busy trying not to think at all
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