Dark Of The Woods

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…

Chapter Eleven
    Not just silence: quieter than that.
    Not just total blackness: darker.
    Not just