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The rain fell for nearly and hour, so Matt and Billy had plenty of time to soap, scrub and rinse until they were really clean. Back inside with the door open, they toweled dry and stood looking out the door as the rain slowly subsided. "I can feel my skin breathing." Billy said softly. "Me too." said Matt. "Now let's try on some of those clothes." They soon discovered wearing long pants and long sleeve shirts was too clammy in the warm humid air, especially after walking ragged and almost naked for so long. So, they put on beige colored shorts over boxer short underwear, but no shirt. But they needed belts to make them fit, since they were still thin after months of starving. Then campers' hats, Billy wearing a tied bandana underneath. But what about socks and shoes? Because their feet were swollen and heavily calloused from treking hundreds of miles, none of the shoes fit them, so they wore adjustable sandals with heel straps. So, what to do with the rest of the day? They had no immediate need of the river, so they put off that grim adventure for some other time. "Let's visit the church" Matt suggested "and maybe we'll find out how these people learned about green technology." So off they strolled, half-dressed in their new attire, up the cobble street and into the square. The church stood on the edge alongside a long string of lowcut storage buildings. They tried to force the back door, but as they later discovered, it was cross-barred inside. The windows were too high to climb, so they circled the building and found basement stairs to a little door only latch-locked which their screw driver opened easily. Shining their flashlights into the dank, musty cellar they found a staicase leading up, so they finally entered the church, which was lit only from the plain colored glass windows, the absence of pews barely noticeable in the gloom except for a shaft of light from an overhead clear glass window that sent a shaft of light where a crucifix once hung on the wall over what once was an altar. "This church was abandoned." Matt was disappointed. "But there must have been an office in the back." They found such a room, but it was empty, not a piece of furniture remaining from whenever it was vacated. "There's nothing here, let's go back." On their way out, Matt carefully relocked the little cellar door and tried to guess what might have happened. "Here is a Colombian village without a functioning church, and apparently no priest." "Maybe the people were too poor to keep it going." Billy offered. "Possibly, but Catholicism is, or was, deeply rooted in the people of Latin America. They wouldn't just walk away from it, or would they? Maybe the priest got married to a local woman and was living in one of the cottages, or moved away. But even so, the Diocese would have sent some one else." "Maybe they didn't have time." Billy suggested. "But there was time to remove everything from the church." "So then," Billy remarked "we can't find out people's names until we go into each house to bury them." "Right." Matt agreed. "But I've been wondering about that. You and I have not had any physical contact with any other human beings since well before we left the beach. We avoided people for fear of robbery of kidnapping, and from Julio Alvarez' letter from his sister, we know the exact date when the virus hit Bogota, about three months ago, today being sometime in what, October?" "You mean we might not really be immune." Billy guessed. That's exactly what I mean. We have no way of knowing, and it might be suicide to find out. We don't even know what day it is!" "So if we handle the bodies, we might get the virus." "Right, or the virus could have died when the bodies dehydrated. We don't know." "And what we don't know could kill us, like at the smugglers' tent." "We had to be sure." "So isn't there some test we can do?" "I doubt it. As far as we know, we're the last two warm-blooded animals left alive here in this area and we don't dare experiment on ourselves." "Supose we splash some water on one of the bodies and it starts to bubble and foam. That would indicate a live virus, wouldn't it?" In the former USA, Billy's love of science fiction films had given him a somewhat bizarre imagination. "Germs don't react as visably as chemicals and we're not doctors or forensic specialists. We don't have a microscope and even if we did we don't know one germ from another. We can assume we're immune and try to bury them, but if we're wrong we're dead. As it is, in a year or two these cottages will slowly collapse over the people inside and form a natural burial mound, which might be better than anything we could do for them. Billy nodded in agreement, and asked his favorite question. "So, what's next Uncle Matt?" Matt smiled. "If it rains often enough we might keep clean without going to war against the alligators. But as usual, our biggest problem is food. All the fruits and vegetables these people used to grow are, of course, rotted away, so what we have is dried corn, beans, peas and coconuts - not enough. If we were to stay here, we would need to make regular expeditions into the jungle, before we learned how to plant and grow them by ourselves, which could take a year. But when we run out of insect repellant, we won't be safe, because we can't shoot all the snakes or slap all the mosquitos, so we could die of poisonous snakebite or malaria from a mosquito bite, especially since we have no real medicine. So, the cooler Andes Mountains is the only area we have any hope of living for any number of years, and hopefully we might find Maria Alvarez, and on the way, we must not forget the mailman. The problem with that is, if we're not immune we can't touch anyone who is, because all such people carry the virus." "So we can only be friends with people like us who were hiding when the virus started? That might only be the Indians in the Amazon jungle." "Right." Matt agreed. The irony brought a wry smile from both of them and Matt shook his head and remarked: "We literally don't know if we're coming or going!" And Billy laughed. Matt continued. "And we can't walk to Bogota, like we did through Central America. I'm too old for another long distance trek, and we don't have any more survival rations or vitamin pills, so we'd likely starve to death on the road. The problem is transportation. There are no vehicles in this village, so where are they? Most likely these people were farm workers who tended the fields we passed through when we found the road. If so, there must be a farmstead nearby. Did they use only horses and wagons, or did they also have a truck and some cars? We need to find out, so tomorrow we hike back up the road but past and beyond our jungle turn-off point. |
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