First Blood Page 18

  The air seemed to dampen toward sunup, and he pulled an army blanket over Trautman on the floor, then wrapped one around himself. There was always something left to do, some flaw in any plan: he remembered that from his training in Korea, and Trautman had said it too, and he was going over the search from every angle for something he might have forgotten. Trautman had wanted helicopters to drop patrols on the highest peaks, from where they could spot the kid if he ran ahead of the search line. It had been dangerous lowering the patrols on pulleys in the dark, but they had been lucky and there had been no accidents. Trautman had wanted the helicopters to fly back and forth out there broadcasting fake directions to confuse the kid, and that was being taken care of. Trautman had suspected the kid would make a break south: that was the direction he had used escaping in the war, and there was a good chance he would try that way again, so the southern line was reinforced except for the intentional weak spots that were traps. Teasle's eyes were burning from lack of sleep, but he couldn't sleep, and then when he could not find any part of the plan that he had forgotten to check, he began to think about other things that he did want to forget. He had been putting them out of his mind, but now, his head starting to ache, the ghosts came of their own accord.

  Orval and Shingleton. The Friday dinners week after week at Orval's place. 'A good way to start the weekend,' Mrs. Kellerman said, always phoning him at the police station on Thursday to find out what he wanted to eat the next day. In the old days she would have been phoning today, and tomorrow they would have been eating - eating what? - no, the idea of food filling his mouth was intolerable. Never Beatrice. Always Mrs. Kellerman. That was what they had decided when his father had been killed and he had gone to live with them. He couldn't bring himself to call her 'Mother,' and 'Aunt Beatrice' never sounded right, so it was always Mrs. Kellerman, and Orval liked that, having been raised to call his own parents 'Sir' and 'Ma'am.' With Orval's name it was different. Orval had been around his father's house so often that Teasle had got to calling him Orval, and the habit was hard to break. Friday dinners. She'd be cooking, and he and Orval would be outside with the dogs and then they'd come in for a drink before dinner, but Orval had given up drinking by then, so it would be just Mrs. Kellerman and himself, and Orval would have tomato juice with salt and tabasco sauce. Thinking about it now, Teasle's mouth salivated bitterly, and he tried not to think of food, thought instead of how the arguments had started and how the Friday dinners had then stopped. Why hadn't he given in to Orval? Was it really so important which way to holster a gun or train a dog that they had to argue about it? Was it that Orval was afraid of getting old and had to show that he was still as able as ever? Maybe they were just so close that every disagree-ment was a betrayal and they had to argue. Or maybe I was so proud that I had to show him I wasn't a kid anymore, Teasle thought, and Orval couldn't bear a stepson talking to him the way he himself had never dared talk to his own father. Mrs. Kellerman was sixty-eight. She had been married to Orval for forty years. What was she supposed to do now without him? All her life was linked with his. Who would she cook for now? Who would she have to clean for and wash clothes for now?

  Me, I guess, Teasle thought.

  And what about Shingleton and the shooting tournaments they had been in together, representing the department? Shingleton had a wife too, and three young children, and what was she supposed to do? Get a job, sell the house, pay for babysitters while she worked? And how am I supposed to explain to both of them about the way their husbands died? he thought. He should have phoned them hours ago, but he couldn't bring himself to do it.

  His paper cup had soggy cigarette butts in the coffee. He lit his last one, crumpling the package, throat dry, thinking about his panic on the bluff, Shingleton crying, 'Look out Will! He's got me!' And then the shot and then his bolting. Maybe if he had stayed, he might have been able to get a shot at the kid, maybe if he had somehow reached Shingleton, he might have found him still alive and been able to save him. Reliving his hysterical race from the bluff, he shook with disgust. You're some tough guy, he told himself. Oh yes, a lot of mouth. And if you had it to do over, you'd do the same.

  No, he thought. No, I'd die before I ran again.

  The bodies up on the bluff. The state police had tried going after them with a helicopter, but from the air all the bluffs looked alike and the police had not found the right one, and finally they had been called back to help with the search. Had the rain half-covered the bodies with dirt and leaves? Were there animals nosing around them, insects crawling across their cheeks? What would Orval be like after his drop from the cliff? Galt's funeral had been yesterday morning, while he himself had been struggling across the field. He was glad that he had not been to it. He wished that he would not have to go to the funeral for all the others when at last they were found and brought back, what was left of them after several days in the forest. A mass funeral. All the coffins in a row before the altar, lids closed, the whole town there looking at him and then at the coffins and then at him once more. How was he supposed to explain to those people why it had to happen, why he had thought it best to keep the kid moving away from town, and why the kid in his bitterness had needed to defy him, both of them unable to stop pushing at each other once the thing had started?

  He looked at Trautman asleep under the army blanket on the floor, and realized that he was coming to see the kid from Trautman's view. Not totally, but enough to understand why the kid had done it all, and even to sympathize a little.

  Sure, but you didn't kill anyone when you came back from Korea, and you had been through almost as much as him.

  But thinking that the kid should have been able to control himself was not going to revive Orval and Shingleton and the rest, and his anger at the kid for shooting Orval was too great to sustain. For the last hours his fatigue had been overpowering it. He no longer had the strength of emotion to rouse great brutal images of what he would enjoy doing to the kid.

  He thought about it, and in his daze from lack of sleep, it seemed to him in a crazy way that everything had been out of control even before he and the kid had met, himself and Anna, the kid and the war. Anna. He was surprised that he had not remembered her in two days, not since the killing had started. Now she seemed farther off in his mind than California, and the pain of losing her was dwarfed by all that had happened since Monday. Still, though small, it was pain, and he did not want any more.

  His stomach cramped. He had to swallow two more pills, the bitter chalk taste worse now because he was anticipating it. Through the open back of the truck he saw the sun barely above the horizon, pale and cold, troops ready along the road, frost coming from their mouths. The radioman was calling each group to be certain they were prepared.

  Teasle leaned over and nudged Trautman on the floor to wake him. 'It's starting.'

  But Trautman was already awake. 'I know.'

  Kern drove up and climbed hurriedly into the back of the truck. 'I've been checking up and down the lines. Everything looks good. What about National Guard headquarters?'

  'They're all set to monitor. Whenever we're ready,' the radioman said.

  'That's it then.'

  'Why are you looking at me?' Teasle said.

  'Since you started things, I thought you might want to give the order to go.'

  7

  Sprawled on the spine of a high ridge, Rambo looked down and saw them coming, first small bands roaming through the woods far off, then a well-organized methodical sweep of the land by more men than he could count. They were about a mile and a half from him, tiny points that were growing fast. There were helicopters flying over, broadcasting orders which he dismissed, unable to decide if they were real or fake.

  He guessed that Teasle expected him to retreat from the line of men and pull back farther inland. Instead he scurried down the ridge toward the men, staying low, using every clump of cover. At the bottom he raced toward the left, one hand holding his side. He would be able to stop running soon. He couldn
't let his pain slow him. The men were only fifty minutes off, maybe less, but if he could get to where he was going before they did, then he would have all the chance he needed to relax. He labored up a wooded rise, slowing in spite of himself, gasping, reached the top, and there it was, the stream. He had been searching for it since he left the mine. The stream where he had lain after Teasle escaped into the brambles. He had judged that it would be close to the mine, and as soon as he had set out, he had climbed to the highest place near to try and see it. No luck. The stream had been too low and too sheltered by trees for him to make out a glint of water or a zigzag depression in the land. He had almost given up when he realized that the sign he was looking for had been there all along. Mist. Early morning fog off water. So he had hurried for it, and now in pain he was stumbling down through trees toward it.

  He reached it where the water was a trickle over stones, a gentle bank of grass on either side. He hunted along it, coming to a deep pool, and here at last the banks were steep, but they were stitched with grass like the ones before. He moved farther on until there was another pool and steep banks, these of mud. A tree on his side of the pool had bare roots, their soil eroded by the water's flow. He could not step in the mud without leaving tracks. He had to grope long-legged from the grass and leaves on the top of the bank to the roots of the tree, and then he lowered himself cautiously into the stream, not daring to dislodge silt from the bottom that might linger in the pool and give him away. He slipped between the tree roots and the bank, in where there was a hollow of sodden earth above him, and then slowly, meticulously, he commenced burying himself, spreading mud over his feet and legs, scooping mud over his chest, drawing the tree roots closer to him, squirming, burrowing deep into the muck like a crab, wiping his face in it, pulling it onto him until he felt the cold wet heavy weight of it all over, breathing with difficulty, just a twig space to take air from. It was the best that he could do. Nothing more to try. An old expression came to him as a joke - you made your bed, now lie in it. So he did, and waited.

  They were a long while coming. As much as he could tell, they had been two rises away when he reached the stream, and he estimated they would be fifteen minutes, perhaps a little longer, before they came to him. But fifteen minutes seemed to go, and there was no sound of them. He decided that his sense of time was off, that lying buried in the mud, nothing to do but wait, he was fooled into thinking a few minutes were a great deal more than that. Oppressed by the mud, he had much trouble breathing now. His air space wasn't enough, but he couldn't afford to make it wider: someone outside might see the hole and be curious. Moisture was beginning to condense in his nose, stuffing it like phlegm. His eyes were closed, the mud settling firmly onto his lids.

  Still no sound of the searchers. He needed something to do, something to help him keep quiet and still, the pressure of the mud unnerving him, so he started counting off the seconds, at the end of each minute expecting to hear the men, sliding into another round of sixty when no sound came, expecting at the end of this minute to hear them, but still no sound. When he had gone through to sixty for the fifteenth time he was positive that things had gone wrong. The mud. Maybe that was it, maybe the mud cut off the sound of people going by and the hunt had gone past him long ago.

  Sure and maybe not. If he had not heard them, they might still be coming. He couldn't take the chance of digging out to look; they might be just now approaching the stream, held up before this by thick underbrush on one of the rises. He waited, moisture filling his nose as if to drown him, frantic to breathe. The mud was pressing harder on his face and chest, and he wanted desperately to push out of it. He remembered playing by a sand cliff when he was a boy, digging into the sand to build a cave, crawling inside, then having the sudden urge to crawl out just as the whole cliff plunged down on him burying his head, him crazy with fear, clawing frenzied at the sand, worming out from under just as more sand spilled down on him. He had barely come out soon enough, and that night as he tried to sleep, he had been certain that in the sand cave a premonition of death occurred to him, that the premonition had been what spurred him to crawl out in time. Now, buried in the ooze and mud, he was thinking that if someone walked over and stood on the ground above him, a part of the bank might be dislodged, plopping down and cutting off his air space. He had the same instant premonition as in the sand cave: he was going to be buried alive, die in here. Already the moisture in his nose was completely clogging his breath. He had to get out, dear God, couldn't bear the suffocation, pushed at the mud.

  And petrified, hearing them. The faint dull plod of footsteps. A lot of them. All together on top. And muffled voices, splashings in the stream, people walking up the stream. The footsteps came closer, one set of them stopping, then thundering close, directly on top, weighing on the mud, on his chest, his broken ribs, the pain. He couldn't move, hadn't been breathing. How long without air. Three minutes. If he had several deep breaths first. Two minutes then. Try holding two minutes. But time for him was so distorted, and one minute seemed like two, and he might need to breathe so much that he would squirm and shove and push out before he had to. Four five six seven, he was counting. To twenty, to forty, and as the sequence drew on, the numbers in his head linked up with his heartbeats that were coming louder and faster, and his chest was contracting, crushing. There. The mud above him budged, the pressure eased, the man on top of him moved. But hurry, not fast enough. The voices, the churning in the stream mercifully diminished. But too slow, he couldn't dig out yet. There might be stragglers. There might be someone who by chance glanced back this way. Oh Christ, hurry. Midway through the second minute, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, throat contorting, forty-eight, forty-nine. He never got to sixty, couldn't endure it anymore, suddenly thought he was so weak-headed from the lack of air that he didn't have the strength to dig out. Push. Push, dammit. But the mud would not part, and he struggled to raise himself, to heave away the mud, and then in a gathering rush, sweet Jesus, cool air was upon him and light and he was gasping, half in the stream. Gray turned to white in his head; his chest ballooned in an ecstasy of breath, then bit sharply in his ribs, drawing in huge gasps of breath, expelling them, sucking them in violently. Too much noise. They'll hear. He quickly looked to see them.

  None around. Voices and rustling in the underbrush. But they were out of sight now, gone now, at last he was in the clear, only one more hard part to go, crossing the nearby roads. He slumped against the bank. On his own. Free.

  Not yet you're not. There's a hell of a lot more to do before you go near those roads.

  Dammit, you think I don't know that? he told himself. There's always something more to do. Always. It never fucking ends.

  Then get busy.

  In a second.

  No. Now. You'll have all the time to rest if they catch you.

  He breathed and nodded and grudgingly propped himself up from the side of the stream, wading through the water to the exposed tree roots. He slipped mud into the hole where he had been behind the roots, arranging it so if another group came through here they could not tell that the first group had missed his hiding place. They had to think that he was deep in the hills, not close to the road.

  Next, his rifle on top of the bank, he eased into the deepest section of the pool and rinsed the mud off him. It did not matter now that he was stirring up silt and dirt from the bottom that might linger; the men who had just gone through here had completely clouded the water, and if they came back or if another group came, they would have no reason to think of him. He dunked his head to clean away the dirt in his hair and wash his face, taking a scummy mouthful and spitting it out with the grit that was in his mouth, blowing his nose underwater to get rid of the mud he had sucked up it. Just because he was living like an animal, he thought, didn't mean he had to feel like one. That was from training school. Be clean whenever you can. It makes you go longer and fight better.

  He climbed dripping out of the stream, chose a thin branch off the ground a
nd used it to clean the mud from inside the barrel of his rifle, to pick dirt from the firing mechanism. Then he worked the lever on the rifle several times to insure that it was smooth, reload the shells he had ejected, and he was finally off, moving cautiously through the bushes and trees toward the direction of the road. He was glad that he had washed the mud off in the stream; he felt better, more energetic, able to escape.

  The feeling disappeared when he heard the dogs, two packs of them, one baying straight ahead, coming his way, the other to his left, moving fast. Those forward had to be trailing the scent from where he had lost Teasle on the slope of brambles, wandered to this stream and headed semi-conscious into the highlands, eventually ending at the mine. Those to the left then were following the route he had taken when he chased Teasle into the brambles. That chase was over a day old, and unless one of the men with the dogs was an expert tracker, they would have no idea which scent was him running toward the brambles and which scent was him wandering away. So they weren't taking any chances; they were setting dogs on both trails.