First Blood

20

In agony, Rambo crawled through the brambles toward the shed. The firelight extended weakly onto it, and he saw how one wall leaned inward, the roof on an angle, but he could not see in through the half-open door, stark black in there. He crawled, but he seemed to be taking a very long while to go a short space, and then he found he was just doing the motions of a crawl, not getting anywhere. He worked harder, slowly managing some distance toward the shed.

But when he came to the black entrance, he refused. In there it was too much like the hole where he had been held prisoner in the war, dark, compressed, constricting. It reminded him strangely of the shower stall Teasle had made him go into, and of the cell Teasle had wanted to lock him in. They had been brightly lit, that was true, but the repulsion had been the same. Everything he was ru

A fight was out of the question now anyway. He had seen too many men die from bullet wounds not to know that he was bleeding to death. The pain continued in his chest, in his head, sharply accented by each pump of his heart, but his legs were cold and numb from the loss of blood, that was why he had trouble crawling, and his fingers were senseless, his hands, nerve extremities gradually shutting off. He did not have much life to go. At least he still had the choice of where it would leave him. Not in there, as in the caves. He was determined never to experience that again. No, in the open. Where he could see the sky unhampered, and smell the night air's unrestricted flow.

He groped to the right of the shed, burrowing awkwardly farther into the brush. The correct spot. That was the necessary thing. Someplace comfortable and friendly. Proper to him. Soothing. He needed to find it before it was too late. A shallow, body-long trough seemed promising, but when he lay face up in it, the trough was too much like a grave. Plenty of time to lie in his grave. Someplace else he needed, just the opposite, high, boundless, his last moments for a taste of it.

Crawling, he peered forward through the brush, and there was a gentle rise ahead, and when he reached the top it was a mound, slopes of brush down every side, the dome a clearing of drooped autumn grass. Not as high as he had wanted. Still it was above the field, and stretching back on top of the grass was pleasant, as if on a straw-stuffed blanket. He peered up at the glorious orange patterns that the flames projected onto the night clouds. At ease. This was the place.

At any rate his mind was at ease. But his pain quickened, racking him, and in contrast, the numbness crept to his knees, his elbows. Soon it would creep to his chest, cancelling the pain, and where after that? His head? Or would he be gone before then?

Well. He had better think if there was anything more to do, anything important he had forgotten. He stiffened in pain. No, there didn't seem anything more to do.

What about God?

The idea embarrassed him. It was only in moments of absolute fear that he had ever thought about God and prayed to him, always embarrassed because he did not believe and felt so hypocritical when he prayed out of fear, as if in spite of his disbelief there might be a God after all, God who could be fooled by a hypocrite. When he was a child, then he believed. He certainly did believe when he was a child. How did it go, the nightly Act of Contrition? The words came hesitantly, unfamiliarly to him. Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for — For what?

For everything that happened the last few days. Sorry that it all had to happen. But it all did have to happen. He regretted it, but he knew if this were Monday again, he would go through the next days the same as he had up to now, just as he knew Teasle would. There was no avoiding any of it. If their fight had been for pride, it had also been for something more important.

Like what?

Like what a lot of horseshit, he told himself: freedom and rights. He had not set out to prove a principle. He had set out to show a fight to anyone who pushed him anymore, and that was quite different — not ethical, but personal, emotional. He had killed a great many people, and he could pretend their deaths were necessary because they were all a part of what was pushing him, making it impossible for someone like him to get along. But he did not totally believe it. He had enjoyed the fight too much, enjoyed too much the risk and the excitement. Perhaps the war had conditioned him, he thought. Perhaps he had become so used to action that he could not ease off.

No, that was not quite true either. If he had really wanted to control himself, he could have. He simply had not wanted to control himself. To live his way, he had been determined to fight anyone who interfered. So all right then, in a way he had fought for a principle. But it was not that simple, because he had also been proud and delighted to show how good he was at fighting. He was the wrong man to be shoved, oh yes he was, and now he was dying and nobody wanted to die, and all that he was thinking about principles was a lot of crap to justify it. To think that he would do everything again the same was just a trick to convince himself that what was happening right now could not have been avoided. Christ, it was right now, and he could not do one damn thing about it, and neither principles nor pride had any matter in the face of what was to come. What he should have done was cherish more smiling girls and drink more icy water and taste more summer melons. And that was a lot of horseshit too, what he should have done, and all that about God was merely complicating what he had shortly decided: if the numbness creeping up his thighs and forearms was an easy way to die, it was also poor. And helpless. Passively defeating. The one choice left to him was how to die, and it was not going to be like a holed-up wounded animal, a quiet, pathetic, gradually senseless deterioration. At once. In a great burst of feeling.

Since his first sight of tribesmen mutilating a body in the jungle, he had been afraid of what would happen to his own body when he died. As if his body still would have some nerve responses, he had imagined with chilling repulsion what it would be like having the blood drained from his veins, embalming fluid pumped in, his central organs removed, his chest cavity treated with preservatives. He had imagined what it would be like having the undertaker sew his lips together and his eye lids down and he had been sickened. Death — strange that death should not bother him so much as what would happen to him after. Well, they could not do all that to him if there was nothing of him to have it done to. At least this way, doing it to himself, there was the chance of pleasure.

He took the final stick of dynamite from his pocket, opened the softly-packed box of fuses and exploders, slipped one set of them into the stick, then arranged the stick between his pants and his stomach. He hesitated to light the fuse. This damn business about God, complicating things. It was suicide he was about, and that could send him to hell forever. If he believed. But he did not, and he had lived with the idea of suicide for a long while, in the war carrying the poison capsule his commander had given him to prevent being captured, tortured. Then when he had been captured, he had not had time to swallow it. Now, though, he would light the fuse.

But what if there was God? Well, if God was, He could not fault him for being true to his disbelief. One intense sensation yet reserved for him. No pain. Too instantaneous for pain. Just one bright dissolving flash. At least that would be something. The numbness up to his groin now, he prepared to light the fuse. Then, with one last bleary glance across the field to the playground, he saw in the firelight the double-focused image of a man in a Beret uniform stalking low and carefully through the cover of the swings and slides. He carried a rifle. Or a shotgun. Rambo's eyes could no longer tell him which. But he could make out it was a Beret uniform and he new that it was Trautman. It could be no one else. And behind Trautman, stumbling across the playground, clutching his stomach, came Teasle, it had to be him, lurching against a rectangular maze of climbing bars, and Rambo understood then there was a better way.