Picking Up the Scraps
Compared with the jungle crawling with snakes, Landon Hawkwell Manor, which had once concealed a snake den, had instead become a sanctuary.
Although the stench still hung everywhere, there wasn't a single snake to be seen anywhere on the manor grounds.
The people sheltering behind the low wall of blue corrugated steel had luckily avoided the impact of the snake tide. They still didn't dare go out to investigate, and continued peeking around nervously.
Not a single snake had managed to break through that thin layer of sheet metal and get inside the low wall.
Only after the last snake disappeared from sight did everyone finally begin to relax.
The area outside the wall was a mess. The corpses of Morudi tribe warriors were scattered everywhere. Only pythons could swallow a body whole, but in their desperate rush to escape, they had merely crushed the bodies until they looked like rag dolls. There hadn't been time to eat them.
Pythons had a habit of lying still after eating, which went against their original intention of rushing out of the cave. They had a simple choice: feast and then calmly face death, or escape with their lives and enjoy several more meals in the future.
So most of the unfortunate souls killed by the snake tide had been lucky enough to leave behind whole corpses—if bodies with not a single unbroken bone, barely recognizable as human, could be called whole.
Because the snakes were packed so densely together, many smaller snakes had been crushed in the chaos as well. As a result, there were not only human corpses nearby, but plenty of dead snakes too. The sight was horrifying.
The leader of the Animal Protection Organization, Wells Black, turned to Major Barto, the representative of the Congo