Michael Palmer - Fatal

More gunshots. It seemed to Matt that there was no way they were going to outrun their pursuers, but Lewis had other ideas. They made a sharp right-hand turn, then dropped down into a series of back-scraping crawls that Matt didn't remember from the trip in. The pounding in his chest and tightness in his throat intensified as it always did when he was in a confined space. He forced himself to keep crawling ahead. Suddenly, he was thinking about his father. What had it been like for him those last seconds after the cave-in? Did he have time to be afraid? Would he have been afraid even if he did? Did the explosion kill him instantly, or was it the crush of rock?

Bullets continued to ping off the rock walls and crack into the stone beneath them. Then abruptly, the shooting stopped.

"This way!" Lewis called back, cutting his light. "They cain't see us no more. Thas why they's stopped shootin'."

He broke into a spasm of coughing, but hesitated only a few seconds and pushed on.

"You know where we are?" Matt asked.

"Les put it this way. Ah know whar Ah am."

He laughed moistly and again began coughing.

"Lewis, are you okay?" Matt asked.

The older man didn't answer. Instead, he dropped to his belly and wriggled through a ragged ten-foot-long crevice not more than a foot and a half high and two feet wide. He was grunting loudly but moving ahead gamely. Matt closed his eyes and followed along the narrow passage, fearing that at any moment he was going to pass out, throw up, or simply get stuck and go insane. Two feet of extra headroom at the end of the crevice brought him the same sort of relief as the cessation of a dentist's drilling.

After what seemed like an eternity on their hands and knees or bellies, the ceiling sloped upward. The air began to taste fresher. Lewis rose to his feet rather shakily and his head and shoulders disappeared into the ceiling. Matt crawled over to him, tilted his head back, and felt a fine rain on his face. About eight feet past Lewis's shoulders, up a narrow chute, he could see the lighter shade of blackness that was the sky.

"Kin ya climb out thet?" Lewis asked, whispering again.

"If I don't get stuck, I believe I can."

"Kin ya boos me up?"

"I think so. I'm going to put my head between your legs and stand up. Just don't punch me for getting fresh."

Lewis missed Matt's tepid humor because he was coughing again.

"Ya sure 'bout this?" he asked when he had caught his breath. "Ah ain't no flyweight, ya know."

"If it means getting out of here, I could lift an elephant. Just rest your hands on the top of my head, and as soon as you can grab someplace to pull yourself up, go ahead. Once I'm standing, I'll push your feet up. Ready? Okay, one, two, three."

Lewis couldn't have weighed more than 130, 140 tops. Matt had more than enough push in his legs to stand up, steadying Lewis by holding his sides, then his feet. Lewis groaned, cried out softly, and then pulled himself up the chute and out of the hole.

"Quick, an' be real quiet," he whispered down.

Matt looked up and this time feared he might not have the strength or purchase on the wet rock to pull himself out. As he was scanning the walls, he became aware that his right hand was wet and sticky. He sniffed his palm and tried to see it, although he really didn't have to try too hard. He had been involved with enough severe crunches in the ER to know the feel and scent of blood.

He braced his back and shoulders against one side of the chute, reached overhead until his fingers curled over some rock, then brought his knees up until he could wedge himself in place. Inch by inch he worked his back up the rock until he could pull his knees up and repeat the maneuver. Finally, he felt the toe of his boot push down on a minute ledge of rock. A moment later, Lewis grabbed him by the collar and helped him out.

They were on a hillside, amidst dense trees. Twenty feet below them, two men with flashlights were searching along the base of the slope. The guards must have radioed for help.

"I'm telling you," one of them was saying, "if they make it out at all, it'll be through one of the places down that way. We ain't doing anyone any good looking around here."

The second man scanned the side of the hill, missing their prostrate quarry by no more than a foot. Then the two of them moved on.

Matt, who had been holding his breath, moved over to Lewis, who lay quite still on the sodden, leaf-covered ground, breathing heavily.

"You're bleeding from someplace," Matt said.

"Tell me somethin' Ah don' know," Lewis replied, grunting the words and stifling a cough. "If'n ya check m' left side, rot between m' ribs, Ah think yew'll find a bullet hole."

Ten minutes passed in absolute silence and darkness before Matt dared to switch on the flashlight. Lewis lay still, facedown, breathing shallowly, as Matt examined him. The left side of his overalls, sweatshirt, and the tattered T beneath it were soaked with blood. A bullet hole — the entry wound, Matt surmised — was next to Lewis's shoulder blade, at about the level of the sixth rib. Blood was still oozing from it, albeit slowly. Gingerly, careful to keep the flash shielded beneath the bloody shirts as much as possible, he rolled Lewis onto his right side.

Using his own shirtsleeve, Matt mopped some of the blood away. He sighed in relief when he spotted the exit wound, just to the left of the nipple. Mentally, he drew a line between the two holes. If the path of the bullet was true, it passed directly through the upper lobe of Lewis's left lung — the larger of the two lobes on that side. But he knew from experience with any number of shootings that, depending on the caliber of the bullet and many other factors, a straight path through the body was often not the case. He had seen a low-caliber shot to the chest where the bullet entered near the spine and exited next to the breastbone without ever passing through the chest at all. It had traveled instead halfway around the torso in the muscle just beneath the skin. In another case, the victim, an elderly shopkeeper shot while thwarting a holdup, had no symptoms except shoulder pain and numbness in his little finger. The entry wound was in the left upper arm, but there was no exit wound, and no bullet in the shoulder or arm on X ray. Eventually, the slug was found inside the man's stomach, having ricocheted down between ribs and lung, puncturing the lung four times before piercing the diaphragm and, finally, the stomach wall.

Matt set his hands on Lewis's back and tried unsuccessfully to determine if the left lung was expanded. Then he put his ear near the entry wound and listened for breath sounds. It was simply too awkward a situation to tell.

"Lewis, how's your breathing?" he asked, checking the pulses in Lewis's arms and neck, which were all strong and steady.

"Be better if'n Ah could have me one a them cigarettes in ma back pocket."

Lewis grunted as he spoke, and stopped twice to cough.

"They'd be soaked. Everything's soaked," Matt said, aching at what he had caused to happen to his old friend.

"Ah put 'em in a baggie. Matches, too."

"Why am I not surprised. Listen, Lewis, as soon as we're away from here I'll give you one. Promise." Matt cut the light. "What do you think we should do right now?"

"Not stay here. Thet's fer certain."

"Can you walk if I help?"

Matt guessed that fifteen minutes or more had passed since Lewis was hit by one of the wildly ricocheting bullets. Over that time, they had traveled quite a ways through narrow, low, winding tunnels. The man might be in his sixties and slight of frame, but he was an absolute bull.

"Ah kin try," Lewis said.

Carefully, as silently as they could manage, they inched their way down the hill, sliding on their backsides. At the bottom they waited again, listening. Finally, Matt slipped his arm around Lewis's waist and helped him first to his feet, then across the narrow clearing between the hill and the woods. From somewhere in the distance they could hear voices, but the threat of discovery — at least imminent discovery — was gone.