First Blood (1990) (29 page)

'Christ, I'm hit,' the man was groaning. 'He hit me. I'm hit.'

But the man did not know how lucky he was. Rambo had aimed at his chest, not his shoulder. No longer able to see to shoot straight, no longer able to hold his gun steady, his chest rapidly draining blood, he had no hope of getting away, no means of efficiently protecting himself, nothing. Except perhaps the stick of dynamite still in his pocket. The dynamite, he thought. Screw the dynamite. With the little strength remaining in him, he would not be able to lob the stick five feet.

'He hit me,' the man was groaning. 'He hit me. I'm hit.'

Well, so am I, buddy, but you don't hear me whining about it, he thought and since he could not accept merely waiting for the men in the siren cars to come for him, he began crawling again. Into a dry wading pool at the center of the playground. Into the center of the wading pool. And there his nerves tingled, stretched to life, and gradually registered his pain. Teasle's bullet had torn through his cracked ribs, and it was like lancing a giant fester, poison spewing forth. The pain grew to overwhelm him. He was scratching at his chest, clawing, ripping. He shook his head, clenched his body, so convulsed with pain that he raged to his feet up out of the wading pool, head stooped, shoulders hunched, tottering toward the fence at the edge of the playground. It was low, and he leaned over it gasping, kicked his feet in the air; in a grotesque somersault came down on the other side, expecting his back to hit ground; instead snagged thorns and leafless branches. A field of brambles. Wild raspberries. He had been here before. He did not remember when, but he had been here before. No. No, he was wrong. It was Teasle who had been here before, up in the mountains, when he had escaped into that whole slope of brambles. Yes, that was it. Teasle had gone in. Now it was the other way around. Now it was his own turn. The barbs dug him. They felt so good, helping him to rip at his pain. Teasle had escaped this way, through brambles like these. Why couldn't he?

Chapter 19

Teasle lay on his back on the concrete of the sidewalk, ignoring the flames, staring up fascinated at a yellow streetlight. If this were summer, he thought, there would be moths and mosquitoes flying around the bulb. Then he wondered why he had thought that. He was losing his stare, blinking now, holding both hands over the hole in his stomach. It amazed him that except for a compulsive itch in his intestines, he had no sensation. There was also a big hole in his back, he knew, but that too was just an itch. So much damage and so little pain, he thought. Almost as if his body no longer belonged to him.

He was listening to the sirens, first a few, then a cluster of them, wailing somewhere beyond the fire. Sometimes they sounded far off, sometimes just down the street. 'Just down the street,' he said to hear himself, and his voice was so distant that his mind had to be separate from his body. He moved one leg, then the other, raised his head, arched his back. Well then, at least when the bullet had gone through, it had not shattered his spine to break his back. The thing is though, he told himself, you're dying. That big a hole and this little pain, you're dying all right, and that too amazed him - that he could think about it so calmly.

He glanced away from the streetlight toward the burning courthouse, even its roof on fire, toward the police station, flames seething out every window. And I just had those inside walls painted, he thought.

Someone was beside him. Kneeling. A woman. An old woman. 'Is there anything I can do?' she gently asked.

You're some old woman, he thought. All this blood and still you made yourself come to me. 'No. No, thank you,' he said, his voice very distant. 'I don't believe there's anything you can do. Unless. Did I hit him, do you know? Is he dead?'

'He fell I think,' she said. 'I'm from the next house down. By the station. I'm not sure exactly about it all.'

'Well,' he said.

'My house is catching fire. The people in this house, someone was shot I think. Can I get you a blanket? Some water? Your lips are dry.' 'Are they? No. No, thank you.'

It was certainly fascinating, his voice far off, but hers close, unfiltered against his eardrum, and the sirens, oh the sirens, wailing louder deep inside his head. It was all reversed, him outside of himself, but everything out there within him. Fascinating. He had to tell her about it. She deserved to know. But when he looked she was gone, and it was like a ghost had been with him. What kind of sign was it that he didn't know when she had gone? The sirens. Too loud. Shrieking like knives through his brain. He raised his head and looked between the fires down toward the bottom of the town square, police cars veering around the corner down there, speeding this way up the street, flashers whipping. Six, he counted. He had never seen anything with such distinct clarity, each detail in pure focus, especially each color of the light, flashers quick intermittent red, frontbeams constant glaring yellow, men behind the windshields orange in the shimmering radiance of the flames. The vision was too powerful. It set the street spinning, and he had to close his eyes or be sick. That would be all he needed. To retch and tear his stomach more, and maybe die right there before he could discover how this would end. It was a grace that he had not already been sick. He was long overdue. Hold together. That was all he could do. If he was going to die, and he was sure that he was, he could not let it come over him just yet. Not until the end.

He heard their tires squealing, and when he looked again, they were braking with a lurch below the station, policemen jumping out before the cars were at full stop, sirens ebbing. One policeman pointed up the street toward him, and they all came running between the fires, shielding their faces from the heat, shoes scuffling on the pavement, and in among them he saw Trautman. They had their guns drawn. Trautman had a pump shotgun

that he must have taken from one of the cruisers.

Now he saw Kern among them too. Kern was telling a man, running as he spoke, 'Go back to the car! Radio for an ambulance!' Kern was pointing up and down the street, tell-ing others, 'Get these people out of here! Push them back!'

What people? He did not understand. He looked, and dozens of people had materialized. Their abrupt appear-ance startled him. They were watching the fires. Something about their faces. They were crowding toward him, eyes aglow, bodies stiff, and he raised his hands to keep them away, irrationally afraid, about to cry, 'Not yet!' as the policemen reached him, blocking them off, encircling him.

'The kid,' he said.

'Don't talk,' Kern told him.

'I think I hit him.' He said it calmly. He concentrated, trying to imagine he was the kid. 'Yes. I hit him.'

'You need your strength. Don't talk. A doctor's coming. We would have been here sooner, but had to go around the fires on the-' 'Listen.'

'Relax. You've done everything you could. Let us handle it now.'

'But I've got to tell you where he is.'

'Here!' a woman screamed from the front lawn of the house. 'Back here! Get a doctor!'

'You eight come with me,' Kern said. 'Spread out. Half on that side of the house, half on this side. Be careful. The rest of you help scatter this crowd.'

'But he's not back there.' Too late. Kern and his men were gone.

'Not back there,' he repeated to himself. 'Kern. What's the matter with him that he can't listen?' It was just as well he had not waited for Kern to help that evening at the start of the chase, he decided. With Kern along, the posse would have been twice as confused, and the men Kern brought would have died with the others.

Trautman had not yet spoken. The few policemen who remained were trying to avoid the sight of all the blood. Not him, though. 'No, not you, Trautman. You don't mind the blood at all. You're used to it.'

Trautman did not answer, just kept staring.

One policeman said, 'Maybe Kern is right. Maybe you should try not to talk.'

'Sure, and that's what I told Orval when he was shot. But he didn't want to die quiet anymore than I do. Hey, Trautman, I did it. I said I would, didn't I? And I did.'

'What's he talking about?' the one policeman said. 'I don't get it.' 'Look at him. His eyes,' another said. 'He's gone crazy.'

Still staring, Trautman gestured for them to be quiet.

'I told you I'd outguess him, didn't I?' His voice was a victorious child's. He did not like the sound of it, but he could not stop himself. Something inside him was rushing it on, getting it all out, the secret. 'He was up there by the side of that porch, and I was the next house down beside that porch, and I could feel he was waiting for me to come. Your school trained him well, Trautman. He did exactly what he was trained to do, and that's how I outguessed him.' His wound was itchy, he scratched it, his blood pooling out, and it was more fascinating to him with every moment how he could go on talking this way. He should he gasping, squeezing out each word, he knew, and here they were coming on and on in a fluent rush like an unspooling ribbon. 'I pretended I was him. Do you see? I've been thinking about him so much it's like I know what he's doing. And just then, the two of us beside the porches, I was imagining what he would do and suddenly I could tell what he was figuring - that I wouldn't come for him on the street side where there was light from the fires, that I'd come around the back through the yard and the trees. Through the trees, Trautman. Do you see it? Your school trained him for guerrilla fighting in the hills, so he instinctively turned to the trees, and the lawn, and the bushes back there. And me, after what he did to me in the hills, I was God damned if I'd ever fight him again on his own terms. On my terms. Remember that's what I told you? My town. And if I was going to get it, I was going to be on my street near my houses with the light from my office burning. And I did it. I outguessed him, Trautman. He took my bullet in the chest.'

Still Trautman did not speak. He looked so long at it before he pointed to the gore of the stomach wound. 'This? You mean this, you're pointing at? I told you. Your school trained him well. My Christ, what reflexes.'

Off in the night, beyond the roar of the fires, there was a full roaring ca-whump that illuminated all that part of the sky. The echo from it rumbled in return over the town.

'Too soon. It went too soon,' the one deputy said in disgust.

'Too soon for what?'

Kern was coming from behind the house, scrambling down the slope of lawn to the sidewalk. 'He isn't back there.' 'I know. I tried to tell you.'

'He shot some guy in the shoulder. That's what the woman was yelling about. My men are looking for a trace of him. There's blood they're following.' He was distracted, glancing at the waves of light in the sky at the side of town.

'What is it? What was that explosion?' Teasle said. 'God, I doubt they had enough time.'

'Time for what?'

'The gas stations. He set two of them burning. We heard on the radio about the fire department over there. The pumps and main buildings are so deep in the flames that they couldn't get in to shut off the gasoline. They were going to disconnect the electricity to that whole part of town when they realized - if they stopped the pumps, the pressure would reverse the fire down into the main tanks and the entire block would go up. I called a squad of my men over to help evacuate. One of the fires was in a section of houses. God, I hope they were in time before it went, and there's another one yet to go, and how many will be dead when this is over.'

A shout from the side of the house: 'He went across a playground over here!' 'Well, don't yell so loud that he knows we're onto him!'

'Don't worry,' Teasle said. 'He's not in the playground.'

'You can't be sure of that. You've been lying here too long. He might have gone anywhere.'

'No, you have to be in his place. You have to pretend that you're him. He crawled through the playground and pushed himself over the fence there and he's in the wild raspberries, the brambles. I got away from him through brush like that, and now he's trying it, but he's wounded too bad. You can't believe the pain in his chest. There's a shed there some children built and he's crawling toward it.'

Kern frowned in question at Trautman and the two policemen. 'What's been going on with him while I was back there? What's happened?' The one policeman shook his head queerly. 'He thinks he's the kid.'

'What?'

'He's gone crazy,' the other said.

'You two watch him. I want him quiet,' Kern said. He knelt beside him. 'Hang on for the doctor. He won't be long. I promise you.' 'It doesn't matter.'

'Try. Please.'

There were bells clanging and more sirens as two big fire engines lumbered up the square, slowing heavily to a stop beside the police cars. Firemen were jumping off, rubber-coated, running for tools to open the water hydrants, reeling out hoses.

Another shout from the side of the house: 'He went clean through the playground! There's blood all through it! There's some kind of field and bushes!'

'Don't shout, I told you!' Then, down to him on the sidewalk. 'O.K., let's find out for you. Let's see if you're right about where he is.' 'Wait.'

'He'll get away. I have to go.'

'No. Wait. You have to promise me.'

'I did. The doctor is coming. I promise it.'

'No. Something else. You have to promise me. When you find him, you have to let me be there for the end. I have a right. I've been through too much not to see the end.'

'You hate him that much?'