"Dad! Dad!" Joshua ran into the tent shouting even before the aftershocks had ceased. "Dad, where are you?"
"Right here, under the table. Is everyone alright? Where are your brothers?" Teddy pushed himself up cradling his precious laptop.
"Dad!" Joshua's eyes were filled with tears and his mouth was moving but no words were coming out.
Teddy didn't ask questions as he ran out of the tent his heart sinking in his chest. He had left the boys working at the Pyramid of Akapana, thought to be the temple of shape-shifting shamans and famous for its puma and human head studded walls. With only the lowest wall complete and a small portion of one of the intermediate walls left after centuries of pillage, there was nothing promising above ground.
Teddy had focused his digging in the well-preserved rainwater drainage canals that surrounded the surviving walls of the original temple. He reasoned that people dropped things into gutters all the time today and they probably did back then too.
Cresting the rise, he saw shovelfuls of dirt flying out of the northwest drainage canal where he had left the boys to explore. Ten-year old Amos stood at the rim of their excavation pit crying. Teddy's gut dropped. Nobody used a shovel on an archeological site! It was Caleb and he was digging furiously, throwing great shovelfuls high into the air out of the interior of the canal.
"Caleb! Where is Jonah?" Teddy jumped the four feet into the rectangular pit they had opened around the drainage canal. Caleb didn't answer but increased the intensity of his shoveling. Sweat was pouring down his face and arms. Teddy could see he was trying to widen the two-foot high, one-foot wide canal on the temple side. Getting down on his hands and knees, Teddy frantically clawed at the dirt with Joshua joining him a minute later.
"Jonah? Jonah?" He shouted, digging and counting the minutes since the earthquake in his mind. Free divers can hold their breath for fifteen, even twenty minutes, but Jonah wasn't a free diver, he was a twelve-year-old boy. What have I done?
"Jonah? Jonah?" Teddy shouted again. Caleb was bawling as he shoveled. Joshua was screaming something at him, but he couldn't understand through the roaring in his ears. He saw Joshua pointing and gesturing into the hole they were making. Suddenly, his own fingers scratched against smooth solid rock.
It was one of the canal topping blocks, but it was lodged vertically, not horizontally over the canal as it was originally placed. At this point, his fingers were bleeding as he frantically cleared away the dirt holding the block in place. The stone wouldn't budge. Minutes were sinking away.
"Jonah?" He shouted, mouth up against the stone, but he didn't hear anything from the other side. "Jonah?" He shouted again, his voice falling and his eyes tearing up. Caleb was just leaning in to tap the stone with his shovel when Joshua came sailing past him to smash a sledgehammer into the center of the canal block. At only three inches thick, the red sandstone was no match for a brother's love and it disintegrated. Clawing the rubble away, Teddy caught hold of a foot and pulled his second youngest son free.
Plopping the boy unceremoniously on the top edge of the pit, he pinched Jonah's nose and leaned in to give him a breath. Instead, he caught a mouthful of dust and spit as the boy coughed. He kept coughing until his eyes watered.
Grateful, Teddy turned his body sideways and clapped his back powerfully two or three times just to show how glad he was that Jonah was alive. Turning him to see his face, Teddy saw a smile through the tears. "I saw mom. She said you'd come." Jonah's eyes rolled back into his head and he passed out.
Just as he was about to try and rouse the boy, Teddy found himself lying over top of him as the sky overhead was cut by the thwop, thwop, thwopping of helicopter blades. Everything in the near vicinity was kicked up into a dust storm.
Squinting through the flying dirt and debris, he could just make out the hem of a black pencil skirt hovering above shiny black pumps. A very, very pretty someone was walking in his direction from the impromptu landing zone a little over twenty feet away.