Dark of the Woods

X

“Faster!” Davis shouted.

She stumbled and went down.

The copter swept overhead, its landing skis no more than six feet above them as it passed. The deafening, chaotic explosion of its blades ate into Davis's bones and made him feel as if he were in a great blender, being spun around the walls.

He ran back to her, helped her up, cradled her in his arm and, half dragging, half carrying her, he ran for the trees and the safety they offered, no matter how short-lived that safety would be when the ground forces and the other three copters arrived.

The one-man craft arced, doubled back, fluttered in toward them, the sun opaquing its glass-bubble cockpit and giving it the look of mercury. The pilot banked, bringing the side-mounted machine gun into the proper angle, and let off another burst of shells.

Davis was spun around and sent crashing head over heels with Leah in his arm. For a short, horrible moment, he was certain he had been hit in the arm, for it was numb. But he saw there was no blood… And he saw that the suitcase had been hit, taking the full brunt of the bullets. It was torn up the middle, and everything it had held was shredded and spilled across the snow: the plastic with which the lean-to could be made, the heat blanket which was their only protection against the stinging, awful cold of the night…

“He's coming back!” Leah shouted, struggling to her feet, trying to help him up.

He gained his feet, grabbed her with his numbed arm, and ran, wondering how they would survive another night without the warmth of the blanket, wondering If it might not be better for both of them to just stop and offer themselves to the pilot of the little craft, open their arms and get it over with in the quick bite of the bullets.

The copter passed, spraying the ground immediately ahead of them with heavy fire.

Davis stumbled and went down in his urgency to keep from running into the death zone. Lying there, trying to get up, he realized that the pilot could have killed them easily before this, that he was trying to see if he couldn't contain them, slow them from the woods until the others had arrived to take them alive. And he was doing very well at that. Only seconds could remain until ground troops would be arriving.

He stopped trying to reach his feet, told Leah to be still, and fumbled the pistol out of his holster. He laid on the ground, as if he were too weak to continue, and waited for the copter to make another pass. He did not know if he could manage what he was about to do, but he had to try. A moment later, the glass-bubble cockpit” swept at them, tilted so the pilot could get a good look. He was grinning, and his finger was on the trigger for his gun.

Had Davis misjudged? Was the pilot just playing with them, tiring them and then killing them like a cat does with a mouse, without any concern about when the ground forces would arrive in the other copters? There was no doubt at all in his mind that the man in that control seat was a sadist. No other sort of man could have that expression with his finger on the trigger of a deadly weapon.

He rolled, brought up the pistol, and fired two rounds into the glass of the machine, directly at the man in the chair. The sharp sound of the gun sounded unrealistic.

The copter pulled up, passed over them, stalled, and spiraled into the earth a hundred yards away. It burst into orange and blue flames that stopped the gurgled scream of the pilot before he and Leah had reached the trees that had been their goal.

“The blanket!” she said when they were in the cool shadows of the trees.

“It was shredded. Useless. The radiators wouldn't work even if there was enough of it to crawl under. We've got to make time.”

In the distance, the sound of approaching aircraft…

“Now!” he hissed.

She followed him into the trees, along another herd path. Without the suitcase they made far better time, for she was easily able to keep up with whatever pace he set as long as the ground was flat and relatively easy-going. They had gone perhaps five hundred yards when one of the huge Alliance copters, a troop carrier, shuddered by, just above tree level. Davis looked up, afraid he might see the hoist lowering armed men, but the worry was unfounded. He bent his head and concentrated on making time. He hoped the craft was not planning on depositing a crew somewhere ahead and letting the fugitives collide with them.

Even though the machine could not attack other men, Davis was pleased to see Proteus floating twenty feet ahead, hull gleaming, marked in one spot by the dark crease of a bullet that had been fired from the one-man copter back on the open field. As long as Proteus was nearby, Davis could remain sane. As children had security blankets which were of no use to ward off their enemies but which still gave them comfort, so he had his protection robot which could not do him any good in the battle in which he was now engaged but which still provided solace because of its past associations with triumph over death and danger.

Then the forest flared crimson…

There was a wash of flame, like liquid, bursting through the trees across their path, sweeping over Proteus,

And there was sound: a bellowing thunder…

Concussion: a fist that thumped the ground and tossed both of them down — hard.

The Alliance had given up on the bring-them-back-alive approach and was now set to destroy them, whatever the cost. The rep whose duty it was to direct Demos's forces had cracked, had let his ego snap and rule supreme over him. Davis and Leah had made a fool out of the searchers once too often; now, with the murder of the single-man copter pilot on his record, Davis was a dangerous fugitive against whom any means of capture or destruction was sanctioned by law.

The chemical flame died as swiftly as it had erupted, though some of the yil trees — tough and durable — near the center of the blast were still burning furiously.

Davis leaped over a twisted mass of metal, started to help Leah across it, before he realized it was the hulk of Proteus. The protection robot had been caught near the center of the grenade eruption and had been smashed open down the middle. The guardian was gone; the security blanket had been taken from him.

For a moment, he was paralyzed with fear, unable to cope. Then, slowly, as two other phosphorescent grenades erupted around them, barely missing killing them, he remembered that she was depending on him, that he had to move, that he had to go one more lap of this journey. He had thought he could not commit violence, and he had committed plenty, starting with that rat he had destroyed in the gas shelter. He had drought he could not do without the adulation of his fans; he had found he was wrong. He had thought he could not survive against other men more rugged than he, against an uncompromising Mother Nature — but he had. Thus far, anyway. In short, he had discovered an entirely new Stauffer Davis, opened up avenues within himself that he had not known existed. It was because of her, the slight girl with wings, and he must not let her down, must not violate the trust she had given him.

Many of the trees were aflame now.

The snow had melted in rivers of whirling water, and the earth was even muddy in some places.

“This way!” he shouted above the crackling and burning, above the sound of copter blades which overlaid the holocaust.

She took his hand, followed him down a narrow corridor of brush and trees which was not yet burning. As they passed through, a grenade struck behind, setting that corridor ablaze as well. They had made it out of the fiery trap without any time to spare.

But the Alliance pilots were apparently able to see them, for they shifted the area of attack and began lobbing chemical grenades to the left and the right. Walls of fire burst into crackling existence around them, and the corridor of safety between was quite narrow indeed. Far ahead, another aircraft began seeding the woodland floor with still more explosives. It seemed as if the okay had been given to destroy a few miles of woodland in order to destroy the prey.

Davis was forced to shield his eyes from the intense heat that made them water and impaired his vision. The world was suddenly a place of illusion and delusion, where firewalls looked only inches away one instant, then seemed to flicker in the distance the next. The snow melted, seeped into the thawing earth and formed mud that sucked at their boots as they tried desperately to negotiate their way down the closing corridor of unburned land. Leah was having trouble walking, for her slim legs had not been made with the sort of musculature necessary to combat the gluelike earth. He walked beside her, helping her, all but carrying her.

He wished he could stop and strip off his clothes, for he was perspiring heavily beneath them. His face, he thought, was receiving a third degree burn and was peeling and bubbling. He saw her face was red-tinted, too, and that rivulets of sweat coursed down her small, pixieish features.

The roar of the fire had become so great that the noise of the hovering copters was no longer audible. He was certain, though he refused to accept it, that they were about to die…

Then, as they came to the end of the pathway and found they were surrounded by fire on all sides, he saw the cliff through the flames, to their left. Beneath the veil of terror that had been drawn down over all his. thoughts, his mind still functioned, perhaps more quickly and cleverly than ever, spurred on — as it was — by desperation. The cliff, somehow, represented a momentary salvation. He could not think why, except that it might offer shelter of a minimal nature where, now, they had none at all. He held her to him, tried to see the rocks more clearly, tried to pick a spot where they should strike for. But the shimmering waves of heat and the licking orange tongues made any detailed examination of the way ahead impossible.

Leah clutched at him, whirled, tried to push herself away. Her Alaskan coat had caught fire. Small, bluish flames danced along the bottom of it. He fought her attempt to stay away from him, carried her to the ground, and fell on top of her, using his own body and clothing to smother the fledgling blaze. He tried to shout, in her ear, what he wanted to do, but the manic scream of the blaze was too great to overcome, and she could not make out what he said, even when his lips were pressed to her ear.

He got to his feet, drew her up, and grasped her, lifted her from the ground, against his hip, when he was certain she understood that she was not to fight him, no matter what he did. Then, forcing himself to use every ounce of energy within him, he burst forward into the fire and through the six-foot line of it, to the cliffside he had caught a glimpse of earlier. As they came out of the fire, he fell, rolling under the overhang of the rock where there was still some snow and a great deal of water puddled in shallow pools, dousing their clothes which had leaped into flame.

The recess under the overhang was about seven feet deep, and a small cavelet, tucked to one side, was wide enough to accommodate both of them and put another eight feet between them and the fire. There was still a great deal of heat, but not more than they could bear. Together, they checked themselves for wounds. Leah was only “sunburned” on the face and had a twisted ankle. He also had suffered facial burns of moderate severity but had picked up another souvenir of the encounter which could mean more trouble to their progress and escape than any burn ever could. In his thigh, on the outside, four inches above his right knee, he had collected a piece of scrap metal from the exploding casing of a chemical grenade. The sharp piece of steel was embedded deep in his flesh, and dark blood welled around it.

“Well have to get it out,” she said.

“How?”

“The medkit, the speedheal will—” She stopped speaking and looked suddenly horrified.

“Exactly,” he said. “It was in the suitcase that got shot up.”

“But you'll get blood poisoning!”

“How far to Tooth?” he asked.

“Half a day.”

“Then there better be a fortress there, because otherwise I'm done. They should have some sort of medical facilities and stockpiles in such a place.”

“But can you walk on it?”

“I'll have to, won't I?”

For the next half an hour, the government pilots lobbed fire spoors into the turmoil of the forest until the inferno raged through such a howling madness that nothing could have survived its countless hot tongues. They were forced to strip off their coats and sweaters, even back in their cool, water-floored cavelet. Often, the air became so superheated that it was difficult to draw a satisfactory breath — though Davis was pleased that the air currents worked in such a way as to draw the smoke upwards, away from the trees, and pulled new air in, underneath. Otherwise, they would have been dead of smoke inhalation inside of minutes. The Alliance rep was taking no chance with his elusive prey.

Finally, when the soldiers ceased shelling the charred and smoking woodlands, when the fire began to abate, Davis decided it was time to move out. Though it was still quite hot, they put their coats on once more, for wearing the bulky garments was easier than carrying them. Outside, in the ashes and thin black skeletons of yil trees, the pall of smoke was so dense overhead that the sky was invisible, shielding them from the view of the police; even after they had left the burned sections and made their way into unmolested trees and brush, it offered them excellent cover against discovery.

Davis hardly felt the chunk of shrapnel in his thigh as they began their last long lap of the trek.

Then it began to itch.

Then burn.

In an hour, it felt as if it were cored with napalm and that the flesh was being burned to ashes from within by steady, small flames, as if the shell of his leg were hollow, without bones or meat to fill it. With each step, it buckled and bent under severe pain.

It bled more than it should. Most of that trouser leg was soaked through.

The flesh in the area immediately around the wound was swollen and a yellow-blue in color.

He felt feverish.

He favored it for the first three hours of the walk, and they stopped to rest periodically. Their progress was hampered, but the Alliance seemed to be certain that they had perished in the forest fire and that misassumption gained them all the time they needed.

Sometimes, sitting on a log or rock, resting the damaged limb, he got furious with his body, as if its ruined leg were its own doing. After coming through so much, he could not contend with the idea that his own inability to go on the last couple of miles would spell the end for them. But he soon realized that a hatred of himself and a disgust with his own weaknesses only depressed him and made it more difficult to go on. On the other hand, if he turned his fury into hatred of the Alliance, a personal, intimate hatred of the little rep and of each and every soldier that had been after them, the anger gave him strength, roused him to the accomplishment of things he had not known possible. When the rage was most brilliant in his mind, he could even put weight on the wounded leg without feeling much pain, if only for a few steps;

And so they progressed, Leah adding her support when he stumbled, Davis's face flushed with fury at the men who had put them in these circumstances, had driven them to this insane flight, banished them from the company of “normal” people. In the writing of so many historical novels, he had become intimately acquainted with nearly every era of mankind's past. It always amazed him that taboos changed so radically from historical moment to historical moment and from one culture to another — even when those cultures might exist in countries whose lands were side by side, or even when they existed within the larger society of a single nation. It was one of the things he tried so hard to make his readers grasp. The structuring of taboos which have nothing to do with the health of a nation but merely interfere with another man's rights is a silly and useless practice. Why tell a man what he may wear or with whom he may make love and under what conditions? In a hundred years, you will be laughed at for your narrow-mindedness. He thought of all this as they walked, and he forced himself to explore the ideas in more detail than ever, in an attempt to relieve his mind of too much consideration of his pain.

Eventually, he came to understand something important about the men who constituted the Alliance, the men who held power over the masses. They had never discovered the concept of “us.” Indeed, they had even rejected the concept of “me” in order to regress to one more barbaric level — the concept of “it.” Each man in the Alliance was part of “it": the government, the great machine of the laws and the prisons and the councils. Each man was a cog inside the overall mechanism, without individuality outside of his operating perspective. This view of the world, this “it” concept was the most dangerous unconscious philosophy ever adopted by a large segment of humanity, for it allowed its adherents — the bureaucrats and soldiers and politicians — to commit the most atrocious acts of physical, emotional, and mental slaughter and abuse against their people that the human mind could conceive. A member of the Alliance government who murdered a “traitor” or other enemy of the state never actually thought of “me” as the responsible party. “It” was to blame, if anyone. The soldier who killed in the war, the general who gave him his orders to destroy, and the president whose policies initiated the combat to begin with — none of them were responsible (in their own minds) as individuals, for they had only been acting in the name of the government, as a small — or even a large — size hardly mattered; the excuse could always apply — cog in the mechanics of “it.” And, in the last level, “it,” the government, was protected as well, since the machine could always rely on the cliché that “the government gets its power from the people" — a ruse to get the people to vote for the same megalomaniacs the next time they went to the polls.

He was jolted out of one of these tangled reveries as they passed out of the forest and climbed up a brush-covered foothill at the base of one of the largest mountains he had ever seen, a gargantuan peak of rock whose form vaguely resembled a wisdom tooth. They had been walking and resting, walking and resting in an almost hypnotic cycle for nine hours, ever since they had left the burned woods. To stop and not sit to raise his leg broke the chain of events, if only a trifle, and called forth his attention.

“Tooth,” she said, holding onto his arm, keeping him erect with her own tense little body. “If I understood my grandfather correctly, the entrance to the fortress is not far.”

He nodded, sorry she had broken the trance into which he had settled so comfortably, for the pain was a great deal worse while he was fully aware of his surroundings.

“Come on,” she said, pulling his arm.

His leg was very warm and an odd tingling sensation pierced it from foot to hip. When he looked down at it, he wished that he had not, for the sight was unsettling. The wound had been torn wider, and the shrapnel had worked its way partially back out. In the process, the severed blood vessel had been permitted more freedom to spurt, and it was jetting regular pulses of warm blood down over his trousers. With an effort, he looked around and saw, behind, that he had been leaving a fairly rich red trail for the last half a dozen steps. In the moonlight, though, the red looked black.

“Hurry!” Leah said.

“Bleeding… too fast,” he said.

“A tourniquet,” she suggested, trying to make him sit down on the snow.

“No time. Only a… medkit. Bleeding too fast. Wound's… too big. I'm sort of sleepy.”

“Don't sleep,” she said. “Fight it!”

Blackness rose out of his guts and surged through his entire body, velvety and smooth and pleasant to behold. He felt his blood pressure dropping as a leaden dizziness clutched him and spun him heavily about.

He screamed silently…

Silently…

Tooth Mountain stood so close — yet so far.

He shambled a few steps forward before he fell and struck the ground hard. The cold snow felt wonderful on the spurting wound, and he suddenly felt sure he would be fine, just fine, with just a little snow in the wound where the blood was… He laid there, feeling good, drowsy, appreciating the cold snow as he slipped quietly, peacefully into death…