Volume 7 Chapter 39: The Swamp of Demons (Part 2)

Pan Zi brought this up, and I remembered it. I thought it made sense, and I think that’s what happened. However, I don’t agree with Pan Zi’s final opinion. The people who fled into the Gobi Desert at that time were militants, but they were all armed with good guns. Although there weren’t many of them, they were well-equipped. If they really entered the swamp, they might not have died. Maybe they stayed in it for a while and then left. There is no one here. Many poachers enter the Qomolangma from here, kill animals and then go to Nepal via the smuggling trail.

There is no way to catch them. It is even possible that these people have settled here. Of course, this is very unlikely. The conditions here are not suitable for people from the outside to live. I also thought to myself that it would be best not to, because these people are too extreme. If we meet, we will have to fight. We don’t have guns or cannons, and if there is a casualty, it would be a shame after all the suffering we have endured. Although it has been so many years, their weapons should have been scrapped.

As I was thinking about this, the fat guy woke up. I told Pan Zi to go to sleep for a while, but he said he wasn’t going to sleep. It was so humid, and he was getting old. If he slept, something would definitely go wrong. There were those few things here, and we couldn’t think about the dead anymore. You guys should get some rest, and we’ll leave here. Anyway, the rain has stopped. If we walk a little further, it should be light out, and we can find a better place to start a fire and rest.

Although I said that, under these conditions, I really couldn’t sleep if I wanted to. We huddled together, smoking cigarettes and watching the darkness outside, listening to the sound of the rain and the wind blowing through the rainforest. Pan Zi was polishing his gun. It was too humid here, and he was worried about the condition of his gun. The others chatted, and as they chatted, the stuffy oil bottle fell asleep.

Pan Zi told me about his time in the war. He was very young when he joined the kitchen staff. One time, their logistics unit encountered Vietnamese special forces. How could cooks and porters fight against the Vietnamese who had been fighting the Americans since childhood? They were later forced into a swamp. Because the Vietnamese were torturing the prisoners, they finally decided to die together. At that time, the guard company that protected them gave each of them a grenade to use as a sacrifice in the final moment.

The Vietnamese were very clever. They didn’t show themselves, but instead spread out in the jungle and crept towards them. They shot here and there, so that they didn’t know where they were going to come in from. They fought and retreated, retreating to the center of the swamp, where the mud was up to their thighs. They couldn’t walk, so the company commander ordered them to prepare.

Everyone took a grenade and retreated into the swamp, covering their faces with mud so that only their nostrils were visible. At this point, the Vietnamese panicked. They didn’t know why, but they were afraid to enter the swamp, so they fired their guns into the swamp. Later, when the bullets were almost gone, they retreated.

Pan Zi and the others dared not move in the swamp for fear that it was a trick by the Vietnamese. They endured it for a whole night, and only cautiously came out when they saw that the Vietnamese had really left. However, when they counted the number of people, they found that two people were missing. They thought that they had been trapped in the mud and used bamboo poles to look for them in the swamp. As a result, they hooked out their bodies and found that these two people had already been eaten, leaving only a transparent skin, and something unknown was beating in their chest cavities.

After this experience, Pan Zi began to be afraid of the swamp. Later, he was transferred to the sharp knife platoon to fight in the rear of Vietnam. When the entire platoon was ambushed and only he and the communications soldier were left, they fled to the edge of a swamp. Pan Zi would rather risk killing all the pursuers than step into such a place again.

As Pan Zi talked, he kept yawning. I was also listening in a daze, my eyelids fighting, and I fell asleep again.

I was half asleep and half awake, not knowing how long it had been. I felt like I was dreaming again, but I felt someone shaking me. That was the most uncomfortable time for me. I wanted to push him away and continue sleeping, but I didn’t push him away. Suddenly, my mouth was covered.

I opened my eyes and saw that it was Ning covering my mouth. Panzi on the side gently shook the fat man. Everyone seemed to have just woken up and was looking at the side.

I turned around to look, and saw a branch above our heads being blown by the wind. The huge canopy of trees was shaking, as if the wind had picked up again, but when I looked carefully, I couldn’t feel any wind around me. I looked up again, and saw a huge brown python slithering from the neighboring tree.