First Blood Read online

They started climbing. Shingleton was first; he went up backward, stooping to hold Orval up by the shoulders. He wedged a foot behind a rock and backed up onto it, and then squinted to see another rock behind him and wedged a foot behind that one and backed up onto it as well. Teasle and Ward followed, bent over taking most of Orval's weight, letting Shingleton worry about where to put his feet so he could back up higher. The stream rushed harder down the slope, swashing against their legs.

  But where were the others, Teasle wanted to know. Why in Christ weren't they helping? The rain was biting cold on his back. He was lifting Orval blindly, and he felt Shingleton ahead, backing up the slope, pulling Orval with him, and Teasle's arms were aching in their sockets, muscles twisting with Orval's weight. It was taking too long. They wouldn't be able to keep carrying him much longer he knew. They had to get to the top. And then Ward slipped and fell and Teasle almost lost his grip on Orval. They tumbled flat on the slope and slid down a few feet sucked by the current as they all scrambled to hang on to Orval.

  They had him. They started working farther up the slope.

  And that was as far as they got with him. Shingleton all at once yelled and came falling past Orval, slamming into Teasle's chest. They reeled backward, falling, and Teasle lost hold of Orval, and the next thing he knew he was flat on his back at the bottom of the slope, water swelling over him, rocks tumbling painfully against him.

  'I couldn't help it!' Shingleton cried. 'The rock slipped out from under me!'

  'Orval! The current's got him!'

  Teasle splashed toward the cliff edge. He wiped his arm across his eyes, blinking to see in the rain. He couldn't let himself go too near the edge - the current was too strong there. But God, he had to stop Orval.

  He slowed, groping closer, wiping his eyes. Lightning flashed. And there, distinct, bright, was Orval's body flipping over the side. Then it was black again, and Teasle's stomach heaved. Hot tears mixed with the cold rain on his face, and he screamed until his throat seized shut, 'God damn those bastards, I'll kill them for not helping!'

  Shingleton loomed beside him. 'Orval! Can you see him?'

  Teasle shouldered past. He made it to the rise. 'I'll kill them!'

  He grabbed for a rock and drew himself up and thrust a foot against a rock and shoved himself up and clawed and dug for handholds through the water sucking past him. All at once he reached the top, bolting into the forest. The din up there was deafening. Wind was bending trees, and rain was shrieking through branches and closeby lightning cracked bright through a trunk with the sharp sound of an ax splitting a solid piece of timber.

  The tree crashed down in front of him. He vaulted over it.

  'Chief!' somebody called. 'Over here, Chief!'

  He couldn't see the face. He only saw the body huddled by a tree.

  'Over here, Chief!' The man was waving his arm in wide gestures. Teasle charged over to him, grabbing his shirt front. It was Mitch.

  'What are you doing?' Mitch said. 'What's the matter with you?'

  'He went over the side!' Teasle said. Drawing back his fist, he punched Mitch hard in the teeth, jolting him against a tree and into the mud.

  'Christ,' Mitch said. He shook his head, shook it again. He moaned and held his bloody mouth. 'Christ, what's the matter with you?' he was crying. 'Lester and the others ran! I stayed behind to stick with you!'

  11

  Teasle must have made it into the forest by now. Rambo was certain of it. The storm had been going on too long and heavy - Teasle and his men could not have held out on that open ledge. With the rain giving them cover so he could not see to shoot, they must have taken their chance to get up that slope and into the trees. That was all right. They would not be far. He had done a lot of this kind of work in the rain and he knew exactly how to hunt men down in it.

  He came out of the bushes and trees, bearing through the rain toward the base of the cliff. In the confusion of the storm, he knew he could escape the other way, deep into the forest if he wanted. Judging from the wide dense cloud cover, he could be hours and miles away before the storm cleared enough for Teasle to track him - so far away that Teasle would never be able to catch up to him again. It was possible that after the ambush and the rain Teasle might not even have the heart to chase after him, but that did not matter: for the moment he was determined not to run anymore, whether he was being chased or not. He had been lying sheltered under the bushes, watching the top of the cliff for another target, thinking about how Teasle had made him into a killer once more and had got him wanted for murder; growing angrier as he thought about all the months, two months at least, that he would have to run and hide run and hide before he reached Mexico; and for now, by God, he was going to turn the game and make Teasle run from him, show him what the hell it felt like. That bastard was going to pay for this.

  But you asked for some of it yourself. It wasn't only Teasle. You could have backed off.

  For the sixteenth time for crissake? No way.

  Even if it was for the hundredth time, so what? Backing off would have been better than this. Leave it alone. End it. Get away.

  And let him do this to somebody else? Screw. He has to be stopped.

  What? That's not why you're doing this? Admit you wanted all this to happen. You asked for it - so you could show him what you knew, surprise him when he found you were the wrong guy to try and handle. You like this.

  I didn't ask for anything. But damn right I like it. That bastard is going to pay.

  The land was dark; his clothes clung icy to his skin. Ahead, long slick grass was bent over in the driving rain, and he waded through, the grass slippery on his smooth wet pants. He came to the stones and rocks that led up toward the base of the cliff, and he stepped cautiously onto them. There were streams of water swirling between them and over them, and in the wind it would be easy to slip and fall and hurt his ribs some more. They were throbbing from when he had leapt off the cliff and crashed against the tree limb, and each time he breathed he felt something pressing sharply inside his right chest. It was like a big fishhook in there, or a jagged chunk of broken bottle. He would have to fix it. Soon.

  Very soon.

  There was a roar. He had heard it back in the trees and had guessed it was from the sound of the wind and rain. But now it was getting louder as he climbed up over the rocks toward the cliff, and he knew it wasn't the rain. The cliff came into gray view and he saw. A cataract. The cliff had become a waterfall, and a flood was cascading down, roaring onto the rocks, spraying mist high up into the rain. It wasn't safe to go any closer; he began working to the right. About a hundred yards along he knew would be the tree he had leapt into. And very near would be the body of the policeman who had fallen off the cliff with his dogs.

  He didn't find the body anywhere around the tree. He was about to look in the wreckage of the helicopter when he realized that the waterfall would have swept the body down over the rocks to the long grass. He went down and the guy was right at the border, face down in the water. The top of his head was struck flat and his arms and legs were sticking off at queer angles. Rambo wondered about the dogs, but he couldn't find them. The carcasses must have been washed farther into the long grass. He knelt quickly to search the body.

  The guy's equipment belt - he needed it. He held his rifle so it wouldn't drop in the water, and with one hand he pulled the body over. The face wasn't too bad, he had seen worse in the war. He stopped looking at it and concentrated on unbuckling the belt and yanking it free.

  The effort set him wincing - his ribs cut inside his chest. Finally he had the belt loose, and he checked what was on it.

  A canteen that was dented but not split open. He unscrewed the cap and drank and the canteen sloshed half-full. The water from it had a stale metallic taste.

  A revolver snug in a holster. There was a leather flap snapped over the handle: not much water would have got in. He unholstered the gun, impressed by how well Teasle equipped his men. It was a Colt Python: a thick four-inch bar
rel with a big sighting pin at the end. The plastic handle it was always sold with had been replaced by a stout wooden grip designed not to be slippery if it got wet. The sights near the hammer had also been changed. Usually they were stationary, but these had been made adjustable for long distance shooting.

  He had not hoped for this fine a gun. It was chambered for a.357 magnum cartridge, the second most powerful handgun load. A man could kill a deer with it. A man could shoot clean through a deer with it. He pushed the lever at the side and swung out the bullet cylinder. There were five shells in it; the chamber underneath the firing pin was empty. Quickly he slipped the gun back into the holster out of the rain and checked the cartridge pouch and counted fifteen more shells. Then he buckled the gunbelt around his waist and stooped, his ribs biting, to search the guy's pockets. But there wasn't anything to take. Especially no food. He had thought the guy at least might have some chocolate.

  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.

  12

  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 spl
it 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.