The Envious Moon by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-10-31T22:28:11+00:00

* * *

Three days went by.

The guard brought him a shirt. And the food ration was increased, with more vegetables besides the beans and rice. Mostly yucca and plantain. His nights were disturbed; mosquitoes, moths and crawling insects preventing him from uninterrupted sleep.

Then one morning, the sound of a helicopter approaching broke the silence. Charles got up and stood in the middle of the pit, jumping, hollering and waving his arms to get its attention. The helicopter flew around several times but, from above, the pilot couldn’t see him. After it had gone away, Cervantes reappeared, accompanied by four of the men. He was angry and kept shouting orders. The men dived into the pit. Charles tried to defend himself not knowing what to expect, but he was weakened and they were too many. They held him by his arms and handcuffed him. Cervantes dropped a rope ladder over the edge. The men forced Charles to scramble up. He surveyed his surroundings: the tents had vanished, there were no signs left of the camp. The rest of the guerrillas were grouped behind a clump of trees. They held their rifles aloft and, for a minute, Charles thought they were going to shoot him. But they were leaving. They carried their knapsacks and the bags of camp equipment on their backs. They started to march but Charles refused to follow them. They pushed him forward and one of them hit him with his rifle butt. Cervantes said something in Spanish. Charles was placed in the middle of the file; the two men behind kept jabbing at him. He had one shoe on, the other hung from laces tied in a knot around his neck. When they were well into the heavily covered jungle, the men up front breaking their way with machetes, the comandante stepped out of the file and waited for Charles to reach him.

He whispered, “Put on your shoe.”

“I can’t. It’s broken. You shot me, remember?”

“It’s better than nothing.”

With the assistance of another guerrilla, Cervantes made Charles sit on the ground. He placed his laptop carefully to one side, got hold of the shoe, which had a big hole and a partly severed sole and, lifting Charles’s swollen foot, he forced it into what was left of the shoe. It hurt and Charles grumbled. Cervantes didn’t mind, he pressed until the foot was tightly in. He ordered the man to tie the laces. Then he helped Charles to get up.

“There are snakes here,” he said.

“You don’t want me to die, after all…”

The foot hurt badly, but walking was easier now.

They trudged for hours. No one ate anything, sometimes they drank from water flasks and twice they offered some to Charles. They arrived at a river brimming with water; it had been raining incessantly. They could just manage to keep their shoulders above the water, holding up their automatic rifles in one hand and the knapsacks in the other. The other equipment was transported in waterproof containers. Charles was tall and the water didn’t reach his chest.

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