The Brass Chills by Hugh Pentecost

Author:Hugh Pentecost
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: world war ii, murder mystery, hard boiled detective, patriotism, wwii women, espionage and sabotage, wwii navy
Publisher: Bold Venture Press

PART FOUR

I

I HADN’T gone fifty yards into the woods before I knew I’d pulled the boner of all time, but I couldn’t turn back now. I plowed on, trying to fight my way barehanded through growth that needed a bob knife. My clothes, my hands, my face were torn to shreds in the first ten minutes.

I made so much noise in that first break-away that I couldn’t tell whether the pack was at my heels or not. It wasn’t until I tripped over a sprawling surface root and landed smack on my face, breathless, that I listened for them. I couldn’t hear anything at first except a roaring in my ears and my heart, beating like a tom-tom. There were voices, scattered, calling to each other. I knew I’d left a trail a baby could follow. I had to keep moving.

There was no chance to think. I had committed myself, and I had to play it that way now. My experience with woods was limited to a little desultory bird-shooting back home. I had never been in tropical woods before. There might be snakes, or tarantulas, or God knows what, I thought. I crawled on my stomach now, trying not to break down any of the growth. Sometimes the voices were close, and then they’d fade away. The men weren’t woodsmen either, or they’d have had me cold in the first twenty minutes.

I don’t know how long it was before I hit a swampy piece of ground. Looking back, I noticed that an oozy slime quickly obliterated my footprints in the mud. I cut straight across the swamp, sinking sometimes to my knees, once almost to my armpits. I remembered a lousy B picture I’d worked on once in which a guy died in a quicksand bog. I wished I’d never heard of it.

When I got to what I decided was the middle of the swamp, I dragged myself up onto a rotted bog and lay there. I was really pooped. The voices were still not too far distant, but I couldn’t go any farther. I couldn’t go any farther if they stuck my face down in the mud and held it there. I was so tired I didn’t care.

I began to understand now why men don’t fight death as hard as they might when it sneaks up on them. A kind of anesthesia settles over your mind. You don’t think straight. You think dying will only take a few minutes. It is much easier to quit fighting.

I lay on that log thinking that if somebody did come along I’d just give up. But ten minutes later, when I heard someone slogging toward me across the swamp, I slid off the log into the soup and lay perfectly still, just my face sticking up above the ooze. Whoever it was passed not five yards away from me.

When I could no longer hear the sound of his sloshing, I pulled myself up on the log again. The bugs bit hell out of me.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.