FB - Escape

But then he realized that his mind was not better at all. He had eaten too much fruit, and the cramps were worse than he expected, and once he could no longer work, the guard would likely shoot him, and even if he did escape, how long could he last, how far could he get, starved and half-dead and diarrheic? He could not remember if he realized all this before or after. Everything became confused, and suddenly he was on his own, crashing through the jungle, collapsing into a stream. The next thing he knew, he was crawling through ferns up a slope, standing at the top, falling onto level grass, standing again and straining to get across the level, then crawling up another slope, at the top no longer able to stand, only to crawl. The mountain tribes, he was thinking. Get to a tribe, was all he could think.

Somebody was making him drink. The soldiers had caught him he was sure, and he fought to break away, but somebody was holding him down and making him swallow. It wasn't soldiers, it couldn't be: they let him break away, stumbling through the jungle. Sometimes he thought he was back in his hole, only dreaming he was loose. Other times he thought he was still dropping from the plane with the rest of his team, his chute not opening.

In two weeks the rain started, coming down forever. Mud. Wood rot. Showers streaming down so thick that he could hardly breathe. He kept on, dazed by the pelt of the rain, infuriated by the suck of the mud, by the wet bushes clinging to him. He could not tell which way was south anymore — the night clouds would break and he would take a bearing from a star, but then the clouds would close up and he'd have to travel blind, and when the clouds once more opened, he'd discover he had lost direction. One morning he found he had wandered in a circle, and after that he travelled only in the day. He had to go slower, more carefully, to keep from being spotted. When clouds obscured the sun, he aimed toward far-off landmarks, a mountain peak or a towering tree. And each day, every day, the rains came.

He fell out of the forest staggering across a field, and somebody shot at him. He stumbled to the ground, crawling back to the trees. Another shot. People running through the grass. 'I told you to identify yourself,' a man was saying. 'If it weren't I saw you didn't have a weapon, I'd have killed you. Stand the hell up and identify yourself.'

Americans. He started laughing. He could not stop laughing. They held him in the hospital for a month before his hysteria left him. His drop into the north had been at the start of December, and it was now the start of May they told him. How long he had been a prisoner he didn't know. How long he had been on the run he didn't know. But between then and now he had covered the distance between his drop area and this American base in the south, three hundred and ninety miles. And what had started him laughing was that he must have been in American territory for days, some of the soldiers he had heard in the night and hid from must have been Americans.


- First Blood, Part 1, Chapter 10