Agent on the Run

"Idiot! Always pull the blue one first!" I whispered harshly to myself in self reprimand.

I really hoped that I hadn't just rung the proverbial dinner bell to summon an aboriginal horde of poison spitters to their afternoon entertainment at pinning the tail on the donkey. I couldn't worry about that right now or at least try not to.

I hurried on into the lab and at least one thing was made easy for me. Shelves lining one side of the room were literally stacked high with boxes of the devices that I had come for. Someone had been planning big.

I grabbed one and stuffed it into my pack and then I grabbed another in case I lost the first, because I wasn't coming back here!

I took off for the temple entrance, but I stopped when I reached it. The jungle still looked its usual self thankfully. I stepped out and down onto the steps. A dart pinged off the column right beside me and I took off down the stairs and into the jungle in my best impersonation of the 100 meter dash.

I wanted to run straight, but a zigzag course was for the best. I dodged away from an oncoming tree trunk and watched, as three darts stuck fast into it. Que the poison arrow side of this adventure. It didn't help how much I knew about what was being shot at me. Check that, it probably did make me run faster, it would be sheer luck to not so much as get nicked by one of the poison tipped projectiles skewering into the heavy foliage all around me.

My avid pastime hobby of being an inveterate bookworm came to the foreground. The poison on the darts skewering through foliage all around me was that of the poison dart frog. While all of the many color variations of the cute little frogs were poisonous one more than the others was more potent than the rest, the Golden Dart Frog. One tiny frog had enough poison to kill 40 adult men or two elephants. Pick either of the options and it was still clear that I was very much dead and my head was a trophy, if one of the darts landed.

The darts were infrequent now, as I had outdistanced the shorter natives, who were still in hot pursuit of me. I felt like I was flying I was running so fast. The idea of having your head lopped off and shrunk will do that to a person.

I was actually getting away from the heathens. No, actually I was in the process of half stumbling my way to a full trip into the forest's floor. In my effort to regain my footing I spied in horror the coiled length of something slung around the branch of a shrub that I was fast approaching. Que the snake side of this misbegotten adventure.