FB - Wake Up

Rambo woke in the dark on cold flat stone. He woke because of his chest. It was swollen so painfully that he had to ease the belt he had cinched around it, and each time he breathed, his ribs lanced him and he had to wince.

He didn't know where he was. He guessed it must be night, but he couldn't understand why the dark was so complete, why there were no grays mixed in with the black, no stars flickering, no faint radiance from cloud cover. He blinked, the dark remained the same, and fearing some damage had been done to his eyes, he quickly spread his hands over the stone he lay on, groped frantically around, touched walls of damp rock. A cave, he thought puzzled. I'm in a cave. But how? And still dazed he began to stagger out.

He had to stop and go back to where he had wakened because he didn't have his rifle in his hand, but then his stupor cleared a little and he realized that his rifle had been with him all along, wedged between his equipment belt and his pants so he started out again. The floor of the cave sloped gradually down though, and he knew that the cave mouth would likely be somewhere up, not down, so once again he had to turn around and start out. The direction of the breeze coming down the tunnel from outside should have told him which way to go, but he didn't figure that until he had stumbled around a bend and reached the mouth.

Outside it was a crystal night, brilliant stars, a quarter moon, the outlines of trees and rocks distinct below. He didn't know how long he had been passed out, nor how he had come to be in the cave. The last things he recalled were struggling up at sunrise from where he lay near the ridge of brambles, wandering through the forest, and collapsing by a stream to drink. He had deliberately rolled into the stream he remembered, and had let the cool water flow over him reviving him, and now he was at the mouth of this cave and it was night, and there was an entire day plus a passage of territory that he could not account for. At least he guessed it was only one day. He suddenly thought, could it have been longer?

Far down and away, there were lights, what looked like hundreds of bright speckles, except that these were off and on, coming and going, yellow and red mostly, traffic on a road he thought, a highway maybe.


- First Blood, Part 3, Chapter 3