Chapter 3
The Shooting.
On the way down the volcano our guide was driving. I was sitting shotgun (*wink, wink, nudge, nudge*), and John was in the back.
So here we are, driving down the volcano, and fast. We passed a couple of shanties and Vlady, as John called him, said; "Civilization, we're okay now." I suppose that the term 'Civilization' is entirely subjective.
Right after we passed the shacks, two guys on the side of the road turned to our car and one of them had a shotgun.
At this moment, I put my hands up, thinking, "If I just give them my money they probably won't hurt us." John, who was in the backseat, and about a million times smarter than me, saw the shotgun and ducked. He recalled thinking, "That is a homemade shotgun." Our guide decided at this moment to try and outrun the thieves, so he floored the car. The thief with the gun then turned and shot at the guide through my(!) window.
The passenger side window exploded, spraying glass into my face and the scratching the cornea of my right eye. The shotgun shot passed in front of my face hitting my left hand and the shoulder of the guide.
Vlady, kept driving his car as fast as possible down the mountain.
Covered with glass and half-blind because of black powder smoke and shards of my window in my eyes, I thought I was dead. I thought that the glass that had hit me in the face and head was actually bullet fragments.
It was at this moment that John sprang into the first of his two of his two emergency modes, First Aid. He said, "You guys are bleeding!" That was when I realized that I should check to see if I had a face. "John," I asked "do I have a face?" "Yes," he said "but it looks like you got hit with glass." He then pointed out my bleeding hand, and gave me a hammock to put pressure on it. I hadn't noticed was bleeding. He also put a towel on Vlady's back. After about a minute, the towel fell off his back. When John tried to put it back on him, Vlady said not to. John then called Vladimir's boss on a cell phone to tell him the situation. Rodrigo, Vladimir's boss, began speaking to John in Spanish, so he handed the phone to me. (John's Spanish is, shall we say, rudimentary, at best. He knows how to introduce himself, ask for a beer and the word for 'coconut'.)
John then went into his second mode: photojournalist.
He pulled his camera out of his backpack and took a picture of the two of us in the front seat. Vlady, blood covered, and myself sitting next to him. The background was a blur of green.
John's shot, immediately after the shooting.
Once we were safely out of range I began asking Vlady to pull over, he had been shot, was in shock (understandably) and was driving rather poorly. I was thinking that if the thieves hadn't killed us the bad roads and erratic driving still could.
We finally made it down the mountain and pulled into the first Clinic that we could find, it turns out that it was for welfare recipients but was a helluva lot nicer than the regular hospital.
The Car, note the shattered window.
When we got inside they spirited Vladimir and myself to a room and gave us shots of some painkiller. After giving Vladimir makeshift bandages for his wounds they irrigated my eye and wrapped my hand.
This is when the police and the ambulance arrived. We got in the ambulance and went to San Rafael Hospital.