The Jungle Setting

Silencio slid sideways through the vegetation and went to one knee. Everything was a haze of murky green shadow and half-light. The air was filled with the rich tang of Jacaranda and the rotting, sour smell of fungi and dead leaves. Thin beams of sunlight slanted through the trees exposing immense spiderwebs shimmering in rainbow colors. As his eyes adjusted, he began to see broken ferns trampled on by La Joyita escapees. Any hope of hearing Abigail and Silo Pol was quashed in an endless cacophony of joyous birds. The outside breeze was gone now, and the air was still. Sweat rolled into his eyes.

Silencio counted to three in his head, then made a twenty-yard dash, stopped, ran twenty-yards more in a slightly different direction, and then another and another. He was following the route the escapees had taken and eventually came to a tin-roofed fishing cabin, now overtaken by the jungle. He stopped here to listen for the river he knew must be nearby, but again, heard only the birds.

The jungle was long and narrow, stretching for miles east to west with a river on one side and a highway along the other. Silencio moved on, continually taking the same short sprints, always changing direction. A jungle fighter again, his training came rushing back. There were so many places Silo Pol could wait in ambush, Silencio’s only real plan was to keep low and keep moving. To not be an easy a target.

The tracks of the fleeing escapees led him to a spot where daylight came through less tangled vegetation. He knelt here and looked out at a dry creek bed with a scattering of once red Balboa beer cans half-submerged in drying mud. Beyond this was a wide expanse of open marshland and then the Pacora River just out of view. In the far distance, he saw separated groups of men hobbling across the boggy flatland. Silo Pol and Abigail were not among them and Silencio thought now he might know where Silo Pol was heading.