Had my restraints been your run-of-the-mill zip-ties, there’s a chance I might have been able to break them—there are several different methods, all of which can be found on YouTube—but these were heavy-duty police zip-cuffs. I knew from my time on the force that they had a 250-pound tensile strength. The only person I’d ever seen break a pair was a three-hundred-pound Samoan. And he was high on PCP.

“I don’t think that’s going to work.” Gina was similarly restrained to a pole three feet to my right.

We’d been marched at gunpoint to two groupings of tall poles. On the west side of the village, it was me, Gina, Martin, and Rix. Sixty yards away, with their backs to us, were Daniel, Patrick, and Diego.

I turned to Gina and said, “You also said it wouldn’t work when I tried to make my own applesauce. Remember that?”

“You put an apple in the microwave for seven minutes, then tried to press it through a strainer.”

“It worked, right?”

“The apple caught on fire after forty-five seconds. You nearly burned down my apartment building.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, remembering. “That didn’t work.”

She rolled her hazel eyes at me, which is something I’d missed dearly.

I leaned forward and glanced down the row. “How are you doing down there, Rix?”

The bullet that struck Rix’s calf appeared to have gone right through—the best one can hope for when a bullet tears through one’s flesh. The one in his shoulder, he wasn’t so lucky with.

“My calf and my shoulder sort of hurt,” he shouted. “And I need to take a shit. Other than that, pretty good.”

I laughed. “What is it about being shot that makes you have to take a dump?” After I took two bullets on a cliff face in Maine, I’d fallen into the Atlantic Ocean and nearly drowned. But when they revived me in the ambulance, one of my first thoughts was, I need a bathroom.

“It’s the adrenaline,” Gina said. “It stimulates the small intestine.”

Speaking of adrenaline, I could see the outline of the EpiPen in the front left pocket of my pants. I could feel fatigue blowing in like an angry nor’easter, and I tried to figure out how to access the injection. But with my feet and hands restrained around the pole, it was simply out of reach.

I turned to Gina and said, “I could have used some small intestine stimulation a few days ago. I was really plugged up from all the plantains I was eating.” I went on to narrate in great detail how I felt movement in my tent, made my way into the jungle, got to Level 9 on Tetris, then—