Lily, Sam, and the three Blue Monkeys were on the road. They’d all been walking for almost an hour in the bright daylight. Not a cloud in the sky. So everyone looked surprised when the light dimmed. Something was blocking the sun.
“Down! Get down!” shouted Risto. Crouching together, the group looked up. Lily could hardly see a thing since Sam and the three monkeys were hunched over her.
“What’s up there?” she whispered. “What do you see?”
“Looks like some flying creature,” Sophia said. “But it is gone now. I do not like the feeling I have about this.”
“We must move forward,” Risto said nervously. Lily noticed he had lost some of his tough guy attitude as they resumed their trek to the village.
The bomb blast was the loudest thing Lily had ever heard. It sounded like thunder delivered right on the road ahead of them. Covering her ears, she screamed and froze in her tracks. In one instant, Sam leapt out in front of the group and—reaching out her thin blue arms—Sophia swooped Lily up. Sam not gently pushed the two of them off the road and into some nearby magenta bushes.
Meanwhile, Risto and Ajax, who were walking a good ten feet behind, ran toward the other three. When the deafening sounds of a second explosion filled the air, Lily found herself half-buried under a pile of three monkeys and a dog. The patch of puffy-leaved bushes had made a surprisingly soft landing. Lily peered out at an enormous crack which had formed in the ground in front of them, separating them from the road they had been on. With a creaking sound and an eerie moan, enormous clumps of earth fell off into the chasm. For the third time in that day, Lily checked to see she was in one piece.