First Blood

Or kill yourself. You were trained to do that too. If things became too much.

But you know you won't. Even if you're passing out and you're positive you're going to die, there's always the chance they'll search these fissures until they stumble into here and find you unconscious.

But they won't. You know you have to follow the breeze into there with the bats. Don't you. You know that.

12

Then go on, get started, get it over with, he told himself.

But instead he sat in the dark on the ledge, listening to the roar of the water below him. He knew what the sound was doing to him, its monotonous rush dulling his ears, little by little pressing him to sleep. He shook his head to keep awake and decided to go in with the bats while he still had the energy, but he could not move; the water rushed on, di

You'll die here, he thought. If you don't soon move, the darkness and the noise will leave you too weak and stupid for anything.

I can't move. I've come too far. I need to rest.

You went farther longer in the war.

Yes. And that's what finished me for this.

All right, then die.

I don't want to die. I just don't have the strength.

'God damn it, go on,' he said out loud, and in the water's roar, his words were flat and echoless. 'Do it quick. Just get in there quick and charge right through where they are and the worst will be done.'

'Goddamn right,' he said, waited, then repeated himself. But if there's anything worse beyond this, I won't be able to stand it, he thought.

No. This is the worst. There can't be anything beyond this.

I believe it.

Slowly, reluctantly, he crawled in the black toward the entrance to the chamber. He paused, gathered strength, and squeezed his body in. Pretend it's tapioca pudding that you'll touch, he told himself, mustering a smile at the joke. But when his hand reached out and grasped the muck, grasped something scabby in the muck, the hand shot back reflexively. He breathed in the sulfurous stench of dung and decay. The gas would be poisonous; once he was fully in, he would have to hurry. Well, here's batshit in your eye, he told himself, pretending another joke, hung back a moment, then charged into the slime, scrambling to his feet. Already he was dizzy and nauseous from the gas. The muck rose up to his knees, and things rattled against his pantlegs as he wallowed through. The breeze went straight ahead.

No. He was wrong again. The breeze came from straight ahead. This was a different air current. The one he had been following must have blown out a different way.

He was wrong about something else too. No matter how much he wanted to hurry, he remembered that he should not. There might be drops in the floor. He had to test each part of the floor ahead of him with his feet, and with each shuffle forward, he expected not to touch more muck and crud, but open space.

The sound in the chamber was changed: before there had been squeaks and the ruffle of wings, but now he heard nothing except the liquid slush of his legs through the deep mire and the dim cascade of water droning on the other side of the entrance. The bats must have gone. He must have slept longer than he knew, until it was night and the bats had gone to hunt and feed. He slogged forward toward the breeze, sick from the stench, but at least they were gone and he relaxed a little. A drop of rotten goo pelted his nose.

He whipped it off and the hair on his neck prickled as the cavern exploded in a thousand bursts of wind and wings. From being on the ledge so long, the roar of water must have partially deafened him. The bats were here all the time, squeaking and settling as before; but his ears had been too dulled to hear them, and now the bats were everywhere, swishing past him, his hands covering his head while he shrieked.

They bumped against him, leathery wings flapping on his face, their high-pitched screeches at his ears. He hit them away, flailed his arms in the air, then covered his head, then flailed again. He wallowed forward, desperate to get out, stumbled, slid to his knees, cold slime up to his hips now, soaking onto his genitals. The bats came and came, an endless swarm of them, tumbling, churning. He reeled to his feet, hands up swatting sightless. The air was infested with them. He could not breathe. He hit out, crouched, shielding himself. They were swirling at him from the right, tapping him, flipping through his hair. He turned his back, crouched lower, his skin creeping. 'Jesus! Jesus!' He shifted to the left, slipped again and fell cheek-bone cracking against a wall. His mind was white inside from the pain of striking, and he barely had the will to straighten, swayed, clutched his swollen cheek as the bats continued swarming at him, past him, forcing him along the wall. Desperate, beaten, and half-senseless, he felt something inside expand and strain and at last rupture, nothing to do with his body, just the center of whatever it was that had kept him going this far, but it was everything. He ceased his fight with them, gave himself up to them, let them push him along, staggered with them, arms slowly sinking to his side, and in that wonderful release from fear and desperation, utterly hopeless and passive, never before so free from caring what happened to him, he came to understand what they were about. They were not attacking him. They were flying to get out. He could not control his laughter, trembling with relief. It had to be night outside. They had sensed it, the leader had given his signal, and as one, they had flushed off the cave roof toward the exit while he was in here with them, terrified that they were coming after him. You wanted a string so you could find your way? he told himself. You blind stupid asshole, you've got it. You've been fighting them, and here every second they've been showing you the way.

He climbed sharp ridges with them, felt for drops, pawed before him. Soon their squeaks and brush of wings became expected and familiar as if he and they had been meant to live in company, until they outdistanced him, a few stragglers fluttering past, and then he was alone, the only sounds the echoing scrabble of his hands and shoes on rock. The sweet cool breeze was blowing strongly on his face, and leaning his face toward it, thinking of how the bats had helped him to this direction out, he began to feel a strange affection for them, missing them now that they were gone, as if a bond had been broken between himself and them. He enjoyed breathing, clearing his nostrils and throat and lungs, erasing the taste of dung in his mouth. The touch of his hands on the rough rock was a clear unfiltered sensation, for the first time consciously real, and his heart beat fast when he climbed and touched dirt, fingering it, wonderfully pebbled and gritty. He was not outside yet. This was silt that rain had washed into a crack in the hill, but he was close he sensed, and he climbed steadily upward, in no hurry, loving the grainy feel of the silt, crawling up a beautiful hillside of it. When he sprawled at the top, he smelled the outside, savoring it: crisp leaves, wind through long grass, woodsmoke in the air. Just a few more feet. He reached carefully forward, his hand stopped by a barrier of rock. He fingered around, and the barrier was on all three sides before him. A basin. How high? It might rise up forever, him so close to being free outside yet trapped. As much as he was easy and content within himself, he did not think he had the corresponding strength to climb high.