Journey to the Center of the Earth

"Is there a bathroom in this theater?" Antonelli looks to both sides.
"This place is a shit hole."

I start in on a coughing fit that ends with a little dry heaving.
"What the fuck did you just say?"
"I have to go to the bathroom."
"You're in a cave in the Amazon Jungle, you dumbass, there are no bathrooms. Find a corner."
"Jake?"
I pull my head lamp off and shine it on my face.
"Oh... shit, man, I was tripping right there."
"You think?"

I stand and re-fit my headlamp. "LOU?"
All I can hear is Antonelli stumbling through the rubble to go and take a piss.
"Goddamn it, Chris... hurry up."
As soon as I hear him piss, I try something and turn my light off.
"HEY, that ain't funny."
"Quiet."

In the complete blackness I can see the glow of Lou's headlamp above, but there is no sound.
"Shit... LOU?"

When Chris is done he gives me a boost up to the edge of the crumbled hole to the cave above. I try to get a purchase to pull myself up, but knock rock and gravel down on Antonelli, who drops me to the cavern below.
"Try again, we have to get to him."
Antonelli heaves with all his might and pretty much launches me up to my waist in the entrance cave. I use the momentum and lift myself out of the hole.

I see his light, aimed at the caved-in entrance, buried under the rubble. There is a bloody hand visible. The rest is buried under brick sized stone. In an instant I am at his side, tearing rock off the pile until I have most of him uncovered. I freeze for a moment and watch his body. There it is... an intake of breath. He is alive.
"Lou?"
There is a burst of dust near his face as he exhales, "I might be getting too old for this shit." He mumbles.
"Are you alright?" I know... it's a dumb question.
"I just blew myself up, what do you think?"

He moves an arm, then the other. He repeats this with his feet and legs. Before long he is on his hands and knees. There is blood coming from his left ear.
"Hey, Lou, you might have a skull fracture... or at the least a blown eardrum."
"Fuck it."
"No really, take it slow." I reach out to support as he tries to stand. He swipes my hand away.
"Leave it be, Nancy. I'm fine."
He struggles to his feet and reaches out to the cave wall for support. Pretty soon he has both hands on the cave and tries to stand on buckling knees.
"Oh yeah, you're a regular Jack LaLane."

The next fifteen minutes is spent recovering from the blast. Lou from his burial, me from my intake of chamber dust. I choke and hack to the point where my head pounds and my chest hurts.
"Jesus... I'm the one who got buried alive." Lou looks at me, "Hey, you're spitting up blood."
"Great." I wipe my mouth on my shirt. "What the hell happened up here anyway?"
Lou nods toward the chamber hole and calls toward it, "Antonelli doens't know the difference between a percussion grenade and a thermal grenade, that's what happened."
I nod knowingly, not that I would have a clue under the same circumstances.

"That first one he threw was a percussion grenade... those will knock the shit out of you but not really blow anything up."
That explains me getting knocked back down the hole.
"Those little fuckers were thick out there so I told him to throw a thermal at them. So he picks that percussion out of the bag and tosses that instead."

"THEY BOTH LOOK THE SAME." Antonelli calls from the chamber.

"So, he throws the percussion grenade? What happened?" I look back at the opening and my light casts on the pile of rock that must be ten feet deep before you reach the jungle.
"So then he grabs a second one. But he doesn't throw this one as far seeing that the first one didn't do all that much and those little prick Yanomami are on us like Oprah on a baked ham."
I nod... he probably grabbed a thermal.
"The second one he throws isn't a percussion... but a thermal." He adds his beam of light to mine and we both look at the results. "Nasty fucking things."

We dig through the rubble and find the Kimbers. Lou checks the slides. One is toast, but the other is still functioning. He tucks them both in the back of his belt. The MP5 and the other pack are either buried in the rubble closer to the entrance, or outside altogether. Either way we aren't going to dig for them. We don't need to get out of here throught this hole. There is another entrance, one used by the Yanomami for centuries before this cave was cut. All we need to do is find it.

A light comes on in our collective thinking. The only way out of here now is an entrance only used by our little friends out there. It is possible that they are racing to that entrance as we sit here in the dark. That is foremost on our minds as we lower ourselves once more into the treasure chamber.

"What kind of damage do you think that last grenade did to their numbers?"
Lou stops for a moment and then looks at Chris, who has been in the dark for the last twenty minutes or so. He holds his hands up to shield his eyes.
"HEY... "
Lou tips his light down and looks back at Antonelli, "How many of those little bastards did you see?"
"More than I could count."
"And then there are the ones you can't see." Lou tries to figure the blast radius of the last grenade. He looks at me. "Anything within fifty meters we sent packing."
"Fucking metric system." Chris says in the dark, "What happened to the Amercian system."

We all agree that we have only slowed the Yanomami down. It would make sense that they would put their most experienced warriors up front on the hunt, so we took them out. But who knows how deep their "bench" is and how far they are willing to go to be rid of us. After all, we already killed their Shaman, wiped out their hunters, and are now in their most sacred offering cave pissing in the corners.

Chris has rummaged through the remaining pack and found a hand held torchlight. The night vision was blown off his head in the first explosion, so he was happy to find something to allow him to see down here.

There is nowhere to go but down. First the easy slope of the chamber we are in. We make our way down, keeping the talk to a minimum in case the Yanomami are on their way in to find us... we hope to hear them before they hear us. Antonelli starts to grab gold nuggets. Lou tries to make him put them back, but Chris has revenge on his mind for his imprisonment, drugging, and near tree-slapping adventure. He agrees not to take any offering from any hole with human parts.

"Fucking little indians. They fucked up my foot. The toes don't work any more."
"So buy another one, Mr. Trump."
"That's what I'll do, asswipe, but I'm not buying. I'll make a gold plated one out of this shit."
He holds up a nugget in he beam of his flashlight, then shakes his hand wildly as though he had a spider crawling on it.
"Oh HELL no."
"What is it?"
Chris shines his light down on the floor and we see one of the little frogs, this one with a blue strip. It is dead, but this does nothing for Chris.
"Those are the frogs they poisoned us with back in their camp. Oh fuck... you trip your balls off, trip your stinkin' balls off.

I look at Lou, and then back to Chris. "What did they do, make you eat them or something?"
"One touch, just one touch and you are done, man." Chris fires the gold nugget back toward the dark from whence we came, then vigorously rubs his hand on his pants. "Those little bastards... that witch doctor. He must have been immune to the shit. He takes the frog and touches your face, or your hand, anywhere. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes later you're gone."

Oh crap. I look at Lou and am blinded by his light as he looks back at me. We both wipe our hands furiously over our clothing.
"Were those live frogs or dead and dried up like that one." I gesture to the darkness of the chamber behind us.
"Live I guess. It was still slimy."

We quicken our pace down the chamber. At certain points a trickle or two of water cross our path. The temperature is dropping slightly as we descend. The chamber seems to be at least a hundred yards long. As we walk, the offerings are in more advanced stages of decay until they are nothing more than handfuls of unidentifiable muck. Finally the chamber tapers and seems to end abruptly ahead of us.

"What the hell?" Lou shines his light on the damp stone at the end of the chamber.
"There has to be a... oh."
He stops and walks ahead of us about ten feet. He steps up and over a rise in the chamber floor that was not discernable at first, then sinks in to the ground and out of sight.
"LOU?" It is as if the ground swallowed him up. I race up and over the rise.
"Hey, wait for me." Antonelli is not about to have the darkness of ages at his back all alone.

The rise in the chamber floor hides an entrance to another space below. I can see Lou's light searching out the dimensions from the bottom of this fairly large opening.
"You okay down there?"
"Yeah, you two get down here."

The drop is substancial, and at first I think I might have fucked up my ankle. It stings, but I walk it off.
"Stay up there, Chris." I yell to him when I see his feet dangling in the hole.
"He can't drop that distance with one leg."

Lou looks around this new chamber and spots a clutch of notched poles piled away from the upper entrance.
"Hold up, Chris. Let me get something for you shimmy down on. The drop will break your good leg."

The poles are crudely cut out to allow the bare feet of the Yanomami to gain a foothold and climb into the offering chamber.
"Help me hold this steady."
Lou lifts the hardwood pole up and through the hole in the ceiling. Chris starts down it and then his weight spins the pole in our hands and he knocks against the back wall of the chamber, dropping off of the pole and onto his back.
"Oh shit... "
We drop the pole and get to his side.
"You okay big guy?"
He has his mouth open and eyes wide. Like a fish pulled from a lake and tossed on the beach.
"Oh he just got the wind knocked out of him, that's all." Lou takes one of his arms and pulls him up to a sitting position.
"Don't make me give you mouth to mouth... again." He tells him as Chris finally squeeks a breath into his lungs.

Another chamber, but this one is not laiden with gold and offerings. It is of the nature of caverns in the states, Carlsbad and the like.
Lou turns his light back toward the pile of poles.
"We need to conserve these lights, gentlemen, or we will be making our way through this shit like Helen Keller playing a game of hide and seek."

Before long, we have managed to find torches left behind by the Yanomami. Chris rustles through the remaining pack and comes up with a hand held flare and a waterproof container of wooden matches.
"Fast or slow, boys?"
"We better save the flare, so slow I guess."

Ten minutes after we drop into this new cavern, torchlite guides our way. I am beginning to hear whispers... see shadows if I dare look behind me. I say nothing. Maybe it won't be that bad.