Everyone and everything had been thrown into
the swamp. The plane crashed violently in the middle of the night and all the
safety and security services had been dispatched to help. The bad thing was
that the area was very remote with no roads and nor real ways to access except
by foot, which would take several days for any person, even the most
knowledgeable as the swamp was concerned. They also send helicopters and
drones, which could see the fire, caused by the fuel, but could do nothing else
than watch, as there were no spots to land.
The families of the victims traveled from
their homes to the nearest town but they were soon frustrated to now that the
area was difficult in every sense of the word. Besides, the imagery registered
by many cameras showed that the fire had already caused explosions and most of
the actual plane was now destroyed. The likelihood of anyone been able to
survive that was very remote but most families stayed in town, trying to join
the rescue teams or at least attempting to be useful somehow before the pain
and the tragedy hit them hard in their hearts.
With machetes, firemen and policemen tried to
cut down some of the swamp trees. That wasn’t very well received by the many
people whose job was to protect that green area. They realized the destruction
caused by the plane could not be prevented but they thought that cutting more
trees to be able to only access a couple of more meters of swamp was just
stupid. Not only because the trees got thicker and less likely to be cut the more
they advanced, but also because of the legends surrounding the place, which
people from the nearby town knew so well too.
The lady that ran the only decent diner in
town was the one who told the families of the victims about the legend of the
swamp. It was said that in ancient times prehistoric men started to come in the
area and that when they tried to travel further the swamp didn’t let them. Some
of the people in the tribe wanted to go through it, others around it. So they
divided into two groups but only one remained. The one that penetrated the
forest never came out. It is said that they remained in there and that they
evolved differently than the rest of humanity.
Someone else explained that it was a legend
similar to the one of Big Foot but in a swamp. Many people had seen the
creature or at least that’s what they said. Fifty years ago, the place was not
a wildlife reserve so people would go in to fish and hunt. There were many
stories from that time about the green gigantic men that roamed all over the
swamp. Some said they helped stranded people; others portrayed them as savage
beasts capable of eating human flesh. Either way, the families of the victims
were not really thrilled about the idea of a beast attempting to eat their
people.
The fire caused by the jet fuel lasted for two
days until a storm helped and extinguished it for good. Drones and helicopters
were used again but at a lower altitude now that they didn’t have to handle
smoke or flames. Their fly-by’s only showed the few pieces left of the planes
and the black water below those pieces. They even detected pieces of clothing
and some objects that any passenger would have like a suitcase or a doll. But
there were no bodies or parts of bodies. They could not detect any victim, dead
or alive, and that was tragic.
The general thought was that the fire had
burned the bodies to a crisp, especially after having been alive for two days.
The force of the impact also had to be accounted for. The most possible outcome
was for every single person to have died because of the fire and not even
because of the violent crash. Those news were very hard on the families who
started leaving the small town right after the announcement. Most of them felt
everything was done for them there.
However, some family members stayed. They
insisted on having at least some bones to bury, some of their objects or
anything they could mourn with. They needed something, anything really, to
start the long and painful process of mourning. Some had lost children, some others
fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. The plane had been at full capacity
on a very popular route. The tragedy was just too big to ignore. The remaining
family members decided to help police and firemen with the look for the black
boxes.
Those were essential to understanding how
everything had happened. It would help bring some closure to the people touched
by the accident and it would also bring much needed answers to the
investigators because the causes of why the planned had crashed were not at all
clear. The aircraft had passed its last revision only a few months ago and had
flown that exact route thousands of times. The night it went down, there was no
storm or atmospheric phenomena that would explain the crash.
The small town saw a surge of people coming in
and out: reporters, investigators and even curious people that knew everything
about the swamp and were dying to know what the crash meant for the alleged
creatures that lived in there. All of those people came and went for weeks, doing
different things to find answers, not always looking for the same ones. But as
they did what they felt they had to do, they had neglected to check other areas
of the swamp. Areas that were even more remotely located than the crash landing
site.
The
swamp was a very large natural entity. It was such a big part of the region
that many roads had to do go around it, making travel very difficult around
that corner of the Earth. The plane had crashed in the area where smaller trees
grew. The area was almost always flooded because of the nearby rivers the swamp
helped in regulating. The importance of the ecosystem was so high that the
people of the region had been the ones to ask the government to protect the
swamp, thus guaranteeing a good flow of the rivers, which would give them fish
and energy.
That was the reason why people didn’t really
care about the swamp, as long as it was there to do its natural job. However
some occasionally tried to get it in order to find the alleged creature that
lived there. The interest arose briefly after the plane crash. However, weeks
later, there was no one very interested in creatures no one had seen in years.
They were more concerned with the swamp turning into a graveyard and the
consequences of the fuel that had been poured into the water. They were more
concerned with that than anything else.
So worried that they ignored the signs coming
fro mother parts of the swamps. Unusual movements of the plants, incipient
fires and large creatures swimming that were not alligators. People had
ultimately survived from the crash but no one was watching in their direction.
They were just three people: two adults and a child. They didn’t have any
connection among them except that they were seating on the same row of the
plane. That row was expelled far from the plane and that was the reason why
they had survived.
However, that was to be seen as they had no
food, the water they were swimming was probably polluted by the jet fuel and
there were animals all around, trying to have something to eat. They had tried
going from tree to tree but that was hard and one of the adults was very
injured. Swimming was the alternative but they had to do it during the day, in
order to know if alligators or similar were around the area. They moved away from
the crash site, thinking they would be seen more easily if they did so but that
proved to be false.
The adult who was injured died three days
after the crash, as he slept on a tree. The kid and the other adult tried to
move onwards but it was practically impossible, as the swamp seemed to be less
“open” as they advanced with the river. On the fifth day, they saw a
helicopter. When they tried to wave to it, the branch of the tree they were
holding on broke and they both fell to the water, near a group of reptiles. As
the animals got closer to attack, another creature appeared out of nowhere,
knocked out the flesh eaters and helped the kid and the adult out of the water.
It was a big, greenish creature. And it seemed to smile.
