First Blood

At the top beneath the pylon, the air was bright and clear, and hurrying up into it he was touched by the last of the setting sun far to the left. He paused, letting the faint warm light soak into him, luxuriating in the soft feel of the ground here beneath his feet. The next peak across from him was bright in the sun as well, but its slope was gray, and the hollow at its base was already dark. That was where he headed, away from the soft ground at the top, down more gravel and boulders, toward the hollow. If he did not find what he wanted there, he would have to angle up to the left toward a stream he had sighted, and then he would have to follow the stream. It would be easier going that way along the bank and what he was looking for would almost surely be near a stream. He came charging down the gravel toward the hollow, slipping, falling, sweat burning salty into his cuts. The hollow was no good when he got there, a swamp straight across, bog and murky water. But at least the earth was soft again, and he rounded the swamp to the left until he reached the stream that fed it, then started up along the stream, no longer running, just walking fast now. He had travelled almost five miles he could tell, and the distance had tired him: he still was not as fit as he had been before he was captured in the war, he still had not got over his weeks in the hospital. All the same, he remembered every trick of getting along, and if he could not run much farther without trouble, he had done five miles very well.

The stream twisted and turned, and he followed it. Soon there would be dogs after him he knew, but he did not bother wading in the stream to try to throw them off his scent. That would only slow him down, and since he would have to come out of the water sometime on one bank or the other, the man working the dogs would merely split the pack along both banks until they picked up the scent again, and he himself would just have wasted time.

It went dark faster than he expected. Climbing uphill he was catching the last gray light, and then the forest and underbrush merged into shadow. Soon only the biggest of trees and boulders were distinguishable in outline, and then it was black. There was the sound of the stream trickling over bedrocks and the sound of crickets and night birds and animals at home in the dark, and he started calling. For sure nobody he was looking for would let him know they were around if all he did was keep following the stream and holler for somebody. He had to make himself sound interesting. He had to make them want to see just who the hell this was. He called out in Vietnamese, in the little French he had learned in high school. He mocked a southern accent, a western one, a Negro one. He strung out long lists of the vilest obscenities he could conjure.

The stream dipped into a brief hollow on the side of the slope. Nobody there. The stream climbed and dipped into another hollow and climbed and dipped, and still nobody, and still he called. If he did not soon find someone, he would be so far up the hillside that the stream would maybe reach its source and he would have no bearing to follow. Which happened. His sweat chilling in the night air, he came to where the stream turned into a little marsh and a spring that he could hear bubbling up.

So much for that. He called once more, letting his obscene words echo up and down the darkened hill, waited, then set off upward. If he kept going straight up slopes and down, he figured eventually to reach another stream and follow it. He was thirty feet past the spring when the two flashlights opened bright on him from left and right, and he stopped absolutely still.

Under any other circumstance he would have leapt free from the glare of the flashlights and crawled off into the darkness. It was worth a man's life to wander around these hills at night, poking where he had no business -how many men had been shot in the head for what he was about, dumped in a shallow grave to let the night animals dig them up.

The flashlights blazed directly on him, one on his face, the other on his naked body. He still did not move, just stood there, head up, staring calmly ahead between the lights as if he belonged there and did this every night of his life. Insects were flying aglitter in and out of the flashlight beams. A bird took off fluttering out of a tree.

'Yeah, best you drop that gun and razor,' an old man said on the right, his throat raspy.

Rambo breathed easier: they weren't going to kill him, at least not right away, he had made them curious enough. Just the same, keeping the handgun and the razor had been a gamble. Once these people had seen them, they might have felt threatened and shot him. But he could not let himself walk these woods at night without something to fight with if he had to.

'Yes sir,' Rambo said evenly and let the gun and razor plop onto the ground. 'No need to worry. The gun's not loaded.'

'Course it isn't.'