Dark Of The Woods

piece of steel was embedded deep in his flesh, and dark blood welled around it.
    "We'll 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