'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?'
'I don't hate him. You don't understand. He wants it. He wants me to be there.'
'Jesus.' Kern looked astounded at Trautman and the others. 'Jesus.'
'I shot him and all at once I didn't hate him anymore. I just was sorry.'
'Well of course.'
'No, not because he shot me, too. It wouldn't have made a difference if he shot me or not. I still would have been sorry. You have to promise to let me be there at the end. I owe it to him. I have to be with him at the end.'
'Jesus.'
'Promise me.'
'All right.'
'Don't lie. I know you're thinking I'm so badly hurt that I can't be moved up to that field.'
'I'm not lying,' Kern said. 'I have to go.' He stood, motioned to his men at the side of the house, and they joined him, spread out, starting nervously up the street toward the playground and the field beyond.
Except for Trautman.
'No, not you, Trautman,' Teasle said. 'You want to stay out of it yet, don't you? But don't you think you ought to see? Don't you think you ought to be there and see how he finally maneuvers himself?'
When Trautman now spoke at last, his voice was as dry as the wood in the courthouse must have been when it caught, tinder for the fire. 'How bad are you?'
'I don't feel a thing. No. I'm wrong again. The concrete is very soft.'
'Oh.' Another full billowing ca-whump lit up the sky over there. Trautman watched it blankly. The second gas station.
'Score another point for your boy,' Teasle said. 'My yes, your school really trained him well. There's no question.'
Trautman looked at the firemen hosing the flames of the courthouse and the police station, at the jagged hole in Teasle's stomach, and his eyes flickered. He pumped his shotgun, injecting a shell into the firing chamber before he started up the lawn toward the back of the house.
'What did you do that for?' Teasle said. But he already knew. 'Wait.'
No answer. Trautman's back was receding through the reflection of the flames toward the few shadows that were left at the side of the house.
'Wait,' Teasle said, panic in his voice. 'You can't do that!' he shouted. 'That's not yours to do!'
Like Kern before him, Trautman was gone.
'Dammit wait!' Teasle shouted. He rolled on his stomach, pawing the sidewalk. 'I have to be there! It has to be me!'
He groped to his hands and knees, coughing, blood dripping from his stomach onto the sidewalk. The two policemen grabbed him, pushing him down.
'You've got to rest,' the one said. 'Take it easy.'
'Leave me alone! I mean it!'
They were struggling to control him. He was thrashing.
'I have a right! I started this!'
'Better let him go. If he tries fighting us anymore he'll rip himself wide open.'
'Look at his blood on me. How much more can he have inside him?'
Enough, Teasle was thinking. Enough. He groped again to his hands and knees, drew up one leg, then the other, concentrating to stand. He had the salt taste of blood in his mouth. I started this, Trautman, he was thinking. He's mine. Not yours. He wants it to be me.
He braced himself, rose, walked a step, then listed, contending for his balance. If he fell, he was certain he would never be able to raise himself again. He had to hold himself steady, balancing as he wove up the lawn toward the house. I know it, Trautman, he was thinking. He wants it to be me. Not you. Me.
20
In agony, Rambo crawled through the brambles toward the shed. The firelight extended weakly onto it, and he saw how one wall leaned inward, the roof on an angle, but he could not see in through the half-open door, stark black in there. He crawled, but he seemed to be taking a very long while to go a short space, and then he found he was just doing the motions of a crawl, not getting anywhere. He worked harder, slowly managing some distance toward the shed.
But when he came to the black entrance, he refused. In there it was too much like the hole where he had been held prisoner in the war, dark, compressed, constricting. It reminded him strangely of the shower stall Teasle had made him go into, and of the cell Teasle had wanted to lock him in. They had been brightly lit, that was true, but the repulsion had been the same. Everything he was running from, he thought, and how could he have been so tired as to consider making a fight from in there.
A fight was out of the question now anyway. He had seen too many men die from bullet wounds not to know that he was bleeding to death. The pain continued in his chest, in his head, sharply accented by each pump of his heart, but his legs were cold and numb from the loss of blood, that was why he had trouble crawling, and his fingers were senseless, his hands, nerve extremities gradually shutting off. He did not have much life to go. At least he still had the choice of where it would leave him. Not in there, as in the caves. He was determined never to experience that again. No, in the open. Where he could see the sky unhampered, and smell the night air's unrestricted flow.
He groped to the right of the shed, burrowing awkwardly farther into the brush. The correct spot. That was the necessary thing. Someplace comfortable and friendly. Proper to him. Soothing. He needed to find it before it was too late. A shallow, body-long trough seemed promising, but when he lay face up in it, the trough was too much like a grave. Plenty of time to lie in his grave
. Someplace else he needed, just the opposite, high, boundless, his last moments for a taste of it.
Crawling, he peered forward through the brush, and there was a gentle rise ahead, and when he reached the top it was a mound, slopes of brush down every side, the dome a clearing of drooped autumn grass. Not as high as he had wanted. Still it was above the field, and stretching back on top of the grass was pleasant, as if on a straw-stuffed blanket. He peered up at the glorious orange patterns that the flames projected onto the night clouds. At ease. This was the place.
At any rate his mind was at ease. But his pain quickened, racking him, and in contrast, the numbness crept to his knees, his elbows. Soon it would creep to his chest, cancelling the pain, and where after that? His head? Or would he be gone before then?
Well. He had better think if there was anything more to do, anything important he had forgotten. He stiffened in pain. No, there didn't seem anything more to do.
What about God?
The idea embarrassed him. It was only in moments of absolute fear that he had ever thought about God and prayed to him, always embarrassed because he did not believe and felt so hypocritical when he prayed out of fear, as if in spite of his disbelief there might be a God after all, God who could be fooled by a hypocrite. When he was a child, then he believed. He certainly did believe when he was a child. How did it go, the nightly Act of Contrition? The words came hesitantly, unfamiliarly to him. Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for - For what?
For everything that happened the last few days. Sorry that it all had to happen. But it all did have to happen. He regretted it, but he knew if this were Monday again, he would go through the next days the same as he had up to now, just as he knew Teasle would. There was no avoiding any of it. If their fight had been for pride, it had also been for something more important.
Like what?
Like what a lot of horseshit, he told himself: freedom and rights. He had not set out to prove a principle. He had set out to show a fight to anyone who pushed him anymore, and that was quite different - not ethical, but personal, emotional. He had killed a great many people, and he could pretend their deaths were necessary because they were all a part of what was pushing him, making it impossible for someone like him to get along. But he did not totally believe it. He had enjoyed the fight too much, enjoyed too much the risk and the excitement. Perhaps the war had conditioned him, he thought. Perhaps he had become so used to action that he could not ease off.
No, that was not quite true either. If he had really wanted to control himself, he could have. He simply had not wanted to control himself. To live his way, he had been determined to fight anyone who interfered. So all right then, in a way he had fought for a principle. But it was not that simple, because he had also been proud and delighted to show how good he was at fighting. He was the wrong man to be shoved, oh yes he was, and now he was dying and nobody wanted to die, and all that he was thinking about principles was a lot of crap to justify it. To think that he would do everything again the same was just a trick to convince himself that what was happening right now could not have been avoided. Christ, it was right now, and he could not do one damn thing about it, and neither principles nor pride had any matter in the face of what was to come. What he should have done was cherish more smiling girls and drink more icy water and taste more summer melons. And that was a lot of horseshit too, what he should have done, and all that about God was merely complicating what he had shortly decided: if the numbness creeping up his thighs and forearms was an easy way to die, it was also poor. And helpless. Passively defeating. The one choice left to him was how to die, and it was not going to be like a holed-up wounded animal, a quiet, pathetic, gradually senseless deterioration. At once. In a great burst of feeling.
Since his first sight of tribesmen mutilating a body in the jungle, he had been afraid of what would happen to his own body when he died. As if his body still would have some nerve responses, he had imagined with chilling repulsion what it would be like having the blood drained from his veins, embalming fluid pumped in, his central organs removed, his chest cavity treated with preservatives. He had imagined what it would be like having the undertaker sew his lips together and his eye lids down and he had been sickened. Death - strange that death should not bother him so much as what would happen to him after. Well, they could not do all that to him if there was nothing of him to have it done to. At least this way, doing it to himself, there was the chance of pleasure.
He took the final stick of dynamite from his pocket, opened the softly-packed box of fuses and exploders, slipped one set of them into the stick, then arranged the stick between his pants and his stomach. He hesitated to light the fuse. This damn business about God, complicating things. It was suicide he was about, and that could send him to hell forever. If he believed. But he did not, and he had lived with the idea of suicide for a long while, in the war carrying the poison capsule his commander had given him to prevent being captured, tortured. Then when he had been captured, he had not had time to swallow it. Now, though, he would light the fuse.
But what if there was God? Well, if God was, He could not fault him for being true to his disbelief. One intense sensation yet reserved for him. No pain. Too instantaneous for pain. Just one bright dissolving flash. At least that would be something. The numbness up to his groin now, he prepared to light the fuse. Then, with one last bleary glance across the field to the playground, he saw in the firelight the double-focused image of a man in a Beret uniform stalking low and carefully through the cover of the swings and slides. He carried a rifle. Or a shotgun. Rambo's eyes could no longer tell him which. But he could make out it was a Beret uniform and he new that it was Trautman. It could be no one else. And behind Trautman, stumbling across the playground, clutching his stomach, came Teasle, it had to be him, lurching against a rectangular maze of climbing bars, and Rambo understood then there was a better way.
21
Teasle clung to the bars, resting, then pushed himself away, staggering toward the fence. He had been frantic that Trautman would get into the field before him, but now everything was going to be fine - Trautman was just a few steps ahead of him, crouched beside a bench, studying the thick brush of the field. Just a few steps ahead of him. He reached out and grabbed the bench to stop from falling, stood against it, breathing hoarsely.
Without a glance away from the field, Trautman told him, 'Get down. He'll see you for sure.'
'I would, but I'd never stand again.'
'So what would be the need? You can't do any good the way you are. Stay out of it. You're killing yourself.'
'Lie down and let you finish it for me? Screw. I'm dying anyhow.'
Trautman looked at him then.
Kern was nearby, out of sight, yelling, 'Christ, get the hell down! He has perfect cover and I'm not risking any men to go in! I sent for gasoline! He likes to play with fire, we'll burn him out!'
Yes, that's your style, Kern, he thought. He grabbed at the itch in his stomach, holding himself wetly in, and shuffled clumsily forward, propping himself against the fence.
'Get the hell down!' Kern yelled again.
Screw. Burn him out, will you, Kern? That's the kind of idea I expected from you, he thought. And you can bet that before the fire gets to him, he'll come through here shooting to take a few of your men with him. There's only one way to do this, and that's for somebody like me who doesn't have a hope anyhow to go in and take him. You haven't lost enough men yet, or you'd know that.
'What the hell was that?' Kern shouted, and Teasle realized that what he had been thinking he had said out loud. That startled him, and he had to get over the fence while he still was able. There was blood here on the fence. The kid's. Good. He would be going over where the kid had. His blood dripping on the kid's, he gathered himself and toppled over the fence. He guessed that he struck the ground hard, but his brain did not register the impact.
In a quick rush, Trautman came from the bench, vaulted the fence and landed in a neat crou
ch in a clump of brush beside him.
'Stay out of here,' Teasle told him.
'No, and if you don't shut up, he'll be onto everything we do.'
'He's not anywhere around to hear. He's way over in the center of the field. Look, you know he wants it to be me. I have a right to be there at the end. You know that.'
'Yes.'
'Then stay out of what doesn't concern you.'
'I started this long before you, and I'm going to help.
There's no disgrace in taking help. Now shut up, and let's go while you still can.'
'All right, you want to help? Then help me stand. I can't do it on my own,'
'You mean it? What a mess this is going to be.'
'That's what Shingleton said.'
'What?'
David Morrell - Rambo 1 - First Blood Page 24