| The opened battered mouth of the corpse bothered him, and he turned the body over with his footA school of maggots was uncovered, and he shiveredFor some reason, he was very frightened, and he turned and went back to the men in the cave
The cave was small and the air in it was dank and oppressiveThe men were sweating heavily, and yet the air seemed coldThe bodies were heaped over the boxes like bags of flour, and when they would try to move one the maggots would scatter like a school of minnowsInside was a disordered rubble of fragments, black charred objects, rusted scraps of metal, shell fragments, a few broken boxes of mortar shells, a few mounds of gray ash like the kind found in trash barrels; there was even just a little bit of a dead body, a charred shinbone jutting from a mound of dirt and ashThe stench had the intensity and delirium of cartier replica watch ladies santos 100 steel ether
"We ain't gonna get a goddam box," Red saidHe was feeling sick, and his back had begun to ache inordinately from the effort it took to shift the bodies with his fingertips
"Let's quit this mess," Gallagher saidThe sunlight at the mouth of the cave seemed astringent
"Men, you ain't gonna quit now, are ya?" Wilson pleadedHe was determined to bring back a box
The sweat ran into Martinez's eyesHe was irritable and impatient"We go back now, huh?" he suggested
Wilson threw a body aside, and then stepped back with an exclamationHe had uncovered a snake, which moved its head slowly from side to side over the top of one of the boxesThe men all drew away with a murmur of fear and flattened against the opposite wall of the caveRed pressed the safety on his gun, and drew a bead slowly on the head of the snakeHis hands were wavering, and he watched the flat eyes of dior replica handbags the snake with absorption"Don' miss," Wilson whispered
The sound of the shot bounded from wall to wall with the over-pouring clamor of an artillery pieceThe snake's head disappeared into a mash of pulp, and its body quivered frenetically for many secondsThe men watched intently, awe-struck, their ears deafened by the noise of Red's gun"Let's get out of here," Gallagher cried
They stumbled over one another in their sudden frenzy to get outAll of them had an acute panicWilson mopped his face and breathed deeply of the air outside the hole"Ah guess that's one box Ah'll never get," he said casuallyActually, he was feeling very tired, and his restlessness had spent itself temporarily"Ah guess we might as well get on back," he said
The men descended the ridge and struck out along the road leading back to the bivouac areaThey passed a gutted tank which lay chanel large black tote bag moldering off the road, its treads broken and rusted, looking like the skeleton of a lizard"Goddam snake like that soon," Martinez saidHe was looking at a corpse which lay almost naked on its backIt was an eloquent corpse, for there were no wounds on its body, and its hands were clenching the earth as if to ask for a last time the always futile questionThe naked shoulders were hunched together in anguish, and he could easily conceive the expression of pain that should have been on the corpse's mouthBut the corpse lay there without a head, and Red ached dully as he realized the impossibility of ever seeing that man's faceThere was only a bloody fragment at the terminus of the neckThe body seemed to lie in a casing of silence
Abruptly Red realized he was sober and very wearyThe other men were already many yards ahead of him on the road, but he continued to chanel handbags shop online look, drawn by some emotion he could not expressVery deep inside himself he was thinking that this was a man who had once wanted things, and the thought of his own death was always a little unbelievable to himThe man had had a childhood, a youth and a young manhood, and there had been dreams and memoriesRed was realizing with surprise and shock, as if he were looking at a corpse for the first time, that a man was really a very fragile thing
The stench of the cave was still in his nostrils, and the cadaver gave him the same kind of horror that he had felt once in stepping on a coil of human feces in the middle of a lawnThere had been a strange self-sufficiency about that as there was now in the torso and limbs of this bodyHe realized that in a little while the fetidness of this corpse would seep into the earth and be lost, but now it was horrible in its prada replica handbags st |
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