David Morrell - First Blood

Stooped, his chest was hurting worse than ever. He had to fix it. Now. He unbuckled the guy's trouser belt and straightened painfully with it, unbuttoning his outer wool shirt and the white cotton shirt under that. The rain slapped at his chest. He wound the belt around his ribs and cinched it like a roll of strong tape holding him tight. And the pain stopped cutting. It switched to a swelling, aching pressure against the belt. Hard to breathe. Tight.

But at least the pain had stopped cutting.

He buttoned up and felt the cotton shirt soggy cold against him. Teasle. Time to go after him. For a second he hesitated and almost went away in the forest: chasing Teasle would cost him time getting away, and if there was another posse in these hills, he might run into them. But two hours wasn't much. That was only as long as he would take to catch him, and after that, under cover of the night, he would still have time to get away. It was worth two hours to teach that bastard.

All right then, which way after him? The niche in the cliff, he decided. If Teasle wanted to get down off the bluff in a hurry, he would likely go back there. With any luck he would be able to head Teasle off and meet him as he came down. He hurried to the right, following the border of grass. Very soon he stumbled across the second body.

It was the old man in green. But how had he tumbled off the cliff so that he ended up all the way over here? His equipment belt didn't have a handgun. It did have a hunting knife, and it had a pouch, and inside Rambo touched something — food. Sticks of meat. A handful. He bit, barely chewing, swallowing, biting off more. Sausage, sticks of smoked sausage, wet and crushed a little from the old man slamming onto the rocks, but it was food, and he was biting into it, chewing, swallowing quickly, forcing himself to slow and mulch it around to all parts of his mouth; then it was almost gone and he was tucking the last bits into his mouth and sucking his fingers; and then all that was left was the smoke taste and his tongue slightly burning from the hot peppers that had been in with the meat.

Sudden lightning and then thunder as if the earth had shuddered. He had better watch himself; he was getting too lucky. First the gun, the bullets, the canteen, and now the knife and the sausage. They had been so easy to get that he better watch himself. He knew how these things worked and how they evened out. One minute you got lucky and the next — well, he would make damn sure he watched himself so all the luck stayed with him.

Teasle kneaded his fist, opening, closing it. The knuckles had gashed on Mitch's teeth, swelling now, but Mitch's lips were swelling twice as bad. In the thunder Mitch tried to stand; one knee gave out and he fell weeping against a tree.

'You shouldn't have hit him so hard,' Shingleton said.

'Don't I know it,' Teasle said.

'You're a trained boxer. You didn't need to hit him so hard.'

'I said I know it. I shouldn't have hit him at all. Let's leave it.'

'But look at him. He can't even stand. How's he going to travel?'

'Never mind that,' Ward said. 'We've got worse troubles. The rifles, the radio, they've washed over the cliff.'

'We've still got our handguns.'

'But they don't have any range,' Teasle said. 'Not against a rifle. As soon as it's light, the kid can pick us off a mile away.'

'Unless he takes advantage of the storm to clear out,' Ward said.

'No. We have to assume he'll come for us. We've been too careless already, and we have to start acting as if the worst will happen. Even if he doesn't come, we're still finished. No food or equipment. No organization. Dead tired. We'll be lucky if we can crawl by the time we get back to town.'

He looked at where Mitch was sitting in the rain and mud, holding his mouth, groaning. 'Help me with him,' he said, lifting Mitch to his feet.

Mitch shoved him away. 'I'm all right,' he murmured through his missing teeth. 'You've done enough. Don't come near me.'

'Let me try,' Ward said.

But Mitch pushed him away too. 'I'm all right, I tell you.' His lips were swollen purple. His head drooped and he covered his face with his hands. 'Dammit, I'm all right.'

'Sure you are,' Ward said and caught him as he sagged to his knees.

'I — Jesus, my teeth.'

'I know,' Teasle said, and together, he and Ward braced Mitch up.

Shingleton looked at Teasle, shaking his head. 'What a mess. Look at how dull his eyes are. And look at you. How are you going to make it through the night without a shirt? You'll freeze.'

'Don't worry about it. Just watch out for Lester and them.'

'By now they're long gone.'

'Not in this storm. They won't be able to see to walk in a straight line. They'll be wandering around this bluff somewhere, and if we stumble into them, look out. Lester and that young deputy are so scared about the kid coming, they're liable to think we're him and start shooting. I've seen it happen like that before.'

Snowstorms in Korea where a sentry shot his own man by mistake, he was thinking, no time to explain. Rainy nights in Louisville where two policemen got confused and shot each other. His father. Something like that had happened to his father too — but he could not let himself think about it, remember it.

'Let's go,' he said abruptly. 'We've got a lot of miles to cover and we're not getting any stronger.'

The rain pushing at their backs, they guided Mitch through the trees. At first his legs dragged in the mud; then clumsily, sluggishly, he managed walking.

A war hero, Teasle thought, his back numb from the cold rain streaming down it. The kid had said he was in the war, but who would have thought to believe him? Why hadn't the kid explained more?

Would that have made a difference? Would you have handled him different from anybody else?

No. I couldn't.

Fine, then you just worry about what he knows to do to you when he comes.

If he comes. Maybe you're wrong. Maybe he won't come.

He came back to town all those times, didn't he? And he'll come this time too. Oh, he'll come all right.

'Hey, you're trembling,' Shingleton said.

'Just look out for Lester and them.'

He could not keep from thinking about it. Legs stiff and hard to move, holding Mitch up as he and the others trudged wearily through the trees in the rain, he could not help remembering what had happened to his father, that Saturday, the six other men who had gone on the deer hunt. His father had wanted him along, but three had said he was too young, and his father had not liked the way they said it, but gave in: that Saturday was the first day of the season, an argument would spoil it.

So the story had come back. How they took up positions along a dried-up streambed that was marked with fresh deer tracks and droppings. How his father swung around to the top where he made a racket to frighten a deer down the streambed where the men would see it going by and shoot. The rule: everybody was to stay in position so that nobody would be confused about where anybody else was. But one of them, on his first hunt, tired of waiting all day for a deer to go by, wandered off to see what he could find on his own, heard a noise, saw movement in the brush, fired, and split Teasle's father's head very nearly in half. The body almost didn't lie in open state: the head was even more shattered than it first seemed. But the undertaker used a wig and everyone said the body looked perfectly alive. Orval had been on that hunt and now Orval was shot too, and as Teasle guided Mitch through the storm across the bluff, he was more and more afraid that he himself was going to die as well. He strained to see if Lester and the others were in the dark trees ahead. If they did lose direction and shoot scared, he knew it would be nobody's fault but his own. What were his men anyhow? Fifty-seven-hundred-dollar-a-year traffic police, small-town deputies trained to handle small-town crime, always hoping nothing serious would happen, always near help if they needed it; and here they were in the wildest mountains in Kentucky with no help around, up against an experienced killer, and God only knew how they had managed to bear up this long. He should never have brought them in here, he realized. He should have waited for the state police. For five years he had just been fooling himself that his department was as tough and disciplined as Louisville's, understanding now that over those years, little by little, his men had got used to their routine and had lost their edge. And so had he. Thinking about how he had argued with Orval instead of concentrating on the kid, about how he had got them all ambushed, and how their equipment was lost and how the posse was split up gone to hell and Orval dead, he was coming to realize — the idea cropping up and him pushing it away and it cropping up again stronger — how really soft and careless he had turned.