Chapter 18 Burning the Sins
After going through so much trouble and wandering around for most of the day, the three women involuntarily returned to the trap set for them by Lao Ba - the camp in the mountains.
Juzi had to admit with a broken heart that this forest was indeed completely controlled by Lao Ba in the dark.
Now, although Lao Ba is dead, his ghost is still around and they are conquered by him again!
Orange looked down the hill with tearful eyes. That was where the shack was. All the nightmares came to her mind in an instant. She felt that the sky was like a hot iron, getting lower and lower, and was about to fall down and burn and crush her.
Since entering the mountains, she has never felt so desperate.
Juzi got up slowly, gathered a bunch of weeds, and covered the skeleton tightly. He then washed the tears from his face with spring water. Then he called Yuhuan and Lanzi and asked them to drink water from the crevice in the rock.
They had drunk enough water, but the three women were all preoccupied with their own thoughts. No one said a word. They all sat on the rocks, listening to each other's heavy breathing.
Juzi heard Lanzi's breathing suddenly became rapid.
Lan Zi, sitting on the stone, looked pale, holding her head in her hands, and looked at the other two women in despair. Her timid, mouse-like eyes were now wet with a layer of moisture, making her look even smaller and more pitiful.
"Lan Zi is craving for cigarettes!" Yuhuan's voice suddenly sounded like a walnut exploding on a hot fire, and it sounded very harsh.
Juzi watched Lanzi fall on the stone, then rolled over and over, groaning. It was as if a poisonous snake had entered her body, controlling her to twist and turn, doing some "difficult" movements that normal people could not do. Finally, Lanzi transformed into a worm, collapsed there, and twitched all over.
"What should we do? Save her quickly, quickly..." Yuhuan couldn't bear it anymore and stamped her feet and shouted.
A secret switch in Juzi's mind and body seemed to be turned on by Lan Zi. She suddenly felt uncomfortable all over and squatted down involuntarily.
Due to her high mental tension along the way, she had not relapsed into drug addiction, but when she saw Lan Zi's appearance, she immediately had a conditioned reflex.
She took out a few dry tobacco gourds from her bosom, shook one into her mouth, and handed one to Lan Zi. The two women chewed eagerly like two hungry little animals... Only then did she remember that she was in such a hurry when she left the camp that she forgot to bring some opium brewed by Lao Ba.
After drinking a few cigarettes, Lan Zi calmed down a little, but she could only lie on the ground, moaning weakly.
Suddenly, a faint smell of smoke drifted into Orange's nostrils.
At this moment, Yuhuan also stood up alertly: "Where does the smell of smoke come from? Is there anyone in the mountain?"
Only Juzi knew that they were actually in the woods not far from the shack. But her heart still couldn't stop beating wildly: Oh my God, everyone in the camp was dead or fled, who was setting the fire?
She stood on a high place and looked down, and saw that the column of smoke was indeed rising from the direction of the camp.
Because there was no wind, a wisp of black and white smoke was curling up into the sky above the treetops, like a strange-looking giant tree.
Orange was stunned and unable to move.
The women followed her gaze and were immediately stunned.
Lan Zi's teeth were still chattering, but she was suddenly awakened by the sudden shock. "The fire from last night must have been on..." She muttered vaguely, as if she couldn't make up her mind.
The women seemed undecided about her judgment and no one responded.
Suddenly a breeze blew over, and the column of smoke moved towards this side. A distinct pungent smell could already be smelled.
Orange seemed to be suddenly awakened: "We have to put out the fire quickly, otherwise, once the forest burns, we will all die!"
As soon as she finished speaking, another column of smoke rose up, and then another...
It turns out that someone was setting the fire!
How could someone set fire to a campsite where only a few dead bodies were left?
Legends about ghosts, spirits, witchcraft, and magic all popped into the women's minds. They all turned pale and walked around in circles, not knowing what to do for a moment.
The thin wisps of smoke soon turned into a thick column of smoke, rising rapidly, and the color turned black with a hint of red.
"Hurry up, follow me and put out the fire!" Orange threw away his usual politeness and shouted at the frightened women.
"Juzi, there are so many fires, can we save them all? Let's just run..." Yuhuan stood still, looking at the smoke columns rising from afar, her face full of hesitation and terror.
"Run? Can you run faster than a forest fire? If there's a wind on the mountain, the fire will run faster than a deer!" Beads of sweat rolled down the tip of Juzi's nose. Her fair face turned red with nervousness and anxiety.
"It will take us a long time to run from here to the camp! It will be too late by the time we get there..." Yuhuan stomped her feet in embarrassment, and her hands suddenly hysterically pulled her hair.
"Sister Juzi, I can't run at all..." Lan Zi was still curled up on the stone slab. She raised her head weakly and looked at the rising smoke. She looked at Juzi and Yuhuan, frowning her pale little face in pain, not knowing what to do.
"Well, Yuhuan, you and Lanzi wait here for me. I'll go to the camp to put out the fires and come back to pick you up..." Juzi said as she took off her coat and stuffed it into the cracks of the rocks. When she took it out, the coat had turned into . As she put the coat on, she gave orders to the two women:
"Take off all your clothes and wet them. Pour some water on your hair... If the fire gets bigger and I'm not back, run away! Run to where there's no fire... Remember?"
Yuhuan and Lanzi were so frightened that their faces turned purple and they were speechless. They just stared at the crazy Juzi in amazement and kept nodding at her subconsciously.
Juzi ran towards the camp! Only then did she realize to her amazement that within just one minute, the situation had changed unexpectedly:
Those individual columns of smoke quickly expanded into a whole cloud of black and white smoke, rolling, getting thicker and closer, pressing towards where Orange and the others were like a tidal wave... Half of the sky immediately turned dark, as if night had fallen early.
"Juzi! Come back! Come back soon... Don't go over there, don't go and die..." She heard Yuhuan crying behind her, "Run! It will be too late if you don't run now!"
Her legs went limp and she could no longer run.
At this time, Yuhuan, who was in a state of dismay, had already caught up with them, and she pulled up the still hesitant Juzi and ran up the mountain. Lanzi followed behind, stumbling like a bird with broken wings, unable to fly, and unable to run fast either.
After running a few steps, Orange suddenly remembered something important:
"Hurry! Get your clothes wet...you won't be able to find water soon!"
The women returned to the stream trembling, took off their outer clothes in a hurry, stuffed them into the cracks of the rocks, and when they pulled them out, they poured the water from the wet clothes on each other's hair. Soon, all the women were soaked like drowned rats.
No one spoke, but their actions were very coordinated. In fact, they were all thinking about the same terrible question, but no one dared to reveal it.
Now, the smoke from the camp has spread into a terrible wildfire, and is approaching Orange and the others step by step.
Several women ran wildly in the woods, trying to find a place without trees to hide, but there were densely packed pine trees everywhere, and the bark was full of thick resin, which would catch fire if it came into contact with fire. There was no safe place in the entire Valley of Confusion.
Groups of wild animals and birds were all mortally frightened and uttered all kinds of strange and shrill cries around them, and fled in all directions through the sky and the earth, following their own paths.
At this moment, Orange really wanted to become a rabbit or an eagle, the farther the better, the higher the better.
As I ran, I found myself blocked by thick bushes and wild vines, so I had to turn back!
At this moment, a wind suddenly blew on the mountain, and the fire took advantage of the wind and rushed towards them with extraordinary speed.
Orange could even feel the choking heat wave approaching step by step, less than a few hundred meters away.
"Matches! Where are the matches?" She suddenly remembered that the few matches she stole from the mute were on Yuhuan's body. She pulled the two women and ran to the trap that had trapped her for several hours. There were only some rocks and small trees around, which might be able to save their lives.
The trap that Juzi had stepped on a few days ago finally appeared. There was a dark hole on it, like a surprised eye. Juzi glanced at the two women, pulled them together and walked towards the black hole...
"What are you going to do?" Yuhuan was frightened by Juzi's eyes.
Without bothering to explain, Juzi shoved the two women into the trap hole, and heard a miserable scream coming from inside.
Orange knew that they were frightened by the skeleton inside.
She grabbed a handful of hay, lit it, and threw it on the ground. The area near the trap was quickly engulfed by flames.
Orange turned around suddenly and jumped into the trap.
There were three living people and one dead person crammed into the small trap, and it didn't take long for them to find it difficult to breathe.
When Juzi looked up, she was confronted with the grinning ghost face in the semi-darkness. She didn't care about being afraid of ghosts anymore, because the fire all over the mountains was more terrifying than any monsters.
The smoke seeped in little by little from the hole above the head, choking the women and making them cough desperately.
Fortunately, the trap was in a relatively low-lying and humid place. The smoke simply swirled in the pit and continued to rise upwards, leaving the women with a glimmer of hope while suffocating.
"Cover your mouth with wet clothes! Just like that..." Juzi demonstrated to the two women with great experience. I remember one autumn when I was a child, I followed my grandmother to the mountains to collect firewood and encountered a forest fire. This is what my grandmother taught me.
Not far away, the vanguard of the fire was approaching step by step with a "woooo" roar, and the "crackling" sound of flames licking the grass and trees exploded in the ears.
The turf covering the trap was also burned, and sparks flew into the trap, scaring the women so much that they huddled against the wall of the pit, screaming.
"Squat down, squat down, squat down quickly!" Juzi pressed the two women's heads down desperately. The three of them pressed their faces tightly against the sand wall of the trap, trying their best to avoid the smoke and breathing the pitiful little air.
Fire dragons, like dancing golden snakes, rolled over, making a series of "whoosh... whoosh..." deafening roars similar to a violent storm, and whizzed past just inches away from where they were hiding.
I just felt that the air was scorching hot. Juzi lay in the pit and smelled the burnt odor of the clothes on his back.
"Oh, oh, it's burned me! The fire burned my hair..." Yuhuan screamed in terror.
"Don't move, don't move..." Juzi raised his hand and scooped up a handful of wet sand from the pit, then sprinkled it on Yuhuan's hair and body, which were making a hissing sound. Then he pressed Yuhuan's head, which was still smoking, down into the sand at the bottom of the pit. "Lie on the ground, don't move..."
The ferocious roar of the fire gradually faded away, but the trap was still filled with thick smoke and the women did not dare to move.
Orange felt that he could no longer breathe or move, as if he had been burned.
She looked up and saw that Yuhuan and Lanzi's faces were covered in black and gray, and they were almost suffocating from coughing.
"Get out! Get out quickly..." Orange pulled the two of them up and climbed out of the trap.
When the women climbed out of the trap, the wildfire had already bypassed the small "firebreak" that had been burned by Orange in advance and was gradually moving away.
The scorched ground was covered with red ashes. When you stepped on them, the soles of your shoes would squeak and smoke.
"Hurry up, run towards the burned area..." Orange was in the front, running towards the camp first.
The women were like headless flies, running around in the heat-shrouded mountain. Before they had run far, they fell one after another in the smoky forest.
I don't know how long it took. There was a roar from above, and a big black bird slowly flew by, with a long trail of white smoke on its tail. Juzi vaguely heard the strange buzzing sound and thought that some monster had come to the forest again. She thought: I can't escape Lao Ba's curse after all...
In fact, the big black bird is a helicopter used by the forest police to put out fires.
This was a forest fire that occurred in the early 1990s in Northeast China and shocked three provinces.
At the fire scene, Juzi, Yuhuan and Lanzi were finally rescued. Although they were all burned to varying degrees, none of them were in danger of death. The wet clothes they were wearing played a significant role.
Unfortunately, there was no reliable physical evidence of Lao Ba's crimes. His poppy garden and the bodies of the innocent men and women he had killed had all been reduced to ashes in the fire. Juzi couldn't even find the body of poor Gou Dan'er.
Fortunately, the search team found half of Dalong's remains near the wolf's den at the entrance of the Lost Valley. Dalong's untimely death, who was wanted by the public security department for drug trafficking, completely shattered all of Juzi's fantasies about this unworthy man.
Although they had endured several months of inhuman torture in the primeval forest, the women's mental states eventually recovered. Now they realized that their previous lives, though dull and even boring, were simply heaven compared to those nightmare days in the forest. They wanted to start a new life from scratch.
After a fire, only a pile of black tree stumps towering into the sky remained in the Lost Valley. This centuries-old primeval forest was severely damaged.
For this reason, the higher-level forestry department was very dissatisfied with the "negligence in management", "lack of understanding of forest conditions" and "poor forest protection and fire prevention" in the forest management in this area, and ordered the relevant personnel to conduct careful surveys and reforest.
According to the clues provided by Juzi and others, people carefully searched Lao Ba's camp and found the mute woman who had climbed to the pine tree where Lao Ba's body was tied, suffocated to death and burned into a small pile of black charcoal. Lao Ba, who had been eaten by wolves, had been reduced to ashes along with the big pine tree, as if such a freak had never existed in the world.
Regarding the mysterious arsonist, relevant personnel analyzed that he was a mute.
It turned out that the damn mute woman was not hanged. She apparently came back to life some time after being put down by Orange, and then started setting fires everywhere in the camp crazily.
After hearing the analysis of the case, Juzi felt extremely regretful: Why did he have such compassion and let the damned mute woman down from the beam of the shack? This was simply letting a tiger go back to the mountain...
But people had no idea whether the mute set herself on fire because she was crazy or to cover up the crimes she and Lao Ba had committed.
Maybe it's a bit of both.
The "Valley of Confusion" no longer exists, and Lao Ba's "gold mine" - the drug plantation was also completely destroyed.
But why is it that no one except Lao Ba can freely enter and exit the haunted Mihun Valley? Apart from the fact that it is a wolf's den that enjoys national protection policy, whether it is due to the peculiar topography, the complex vegetation in the forest, or because there is indeed a mysterious force secretly controlling it, it remains an "unsolved case".
(End of the book)
