First, though, the second of the three.
Cooper found the man gurgling in pain on the floor of the passageway, rocking slightly, busy trying to get oxygen into his flooded lungs. Pulling the machete the man kept on his belt, memories registering of the slices this one had made on his arms, legs, even once across his cock, Cooper grinned a diseased, insane, murderous grin-and swung. He sliced clear through one of the man’s arms and Cooper heard the machete clang on the rock floor of the passageway. It felt so good to him that the tremors of an orgasm came searching for his loins, but his testicles had endured so much pain by then the tremors were met by a brick wall and retreated. Cooper sought more of the pleasure, savagely-an addict going for the ultimate hit, slicing, whacking, chopping, exhausting himself as he diced his former captor into what he remembered counting as nine pieces. He went back, then, to the man with no face-the one he had shot. The man was already dead, but the addict craving another hit could not shake his need, and so he lifted the man by his remaining hair, held his body in a seated position, and beheaded what was left of the guard’s skull with the machete.
Thrusting the machete under the arm that held the faceless head, he drew the stolen pistol again with the other hand and began to run. Not away-not yet. Head in hand, holding it out ahead of him, he ran, screaming at the edge of his deteriorated larynx, sprinting headlong down the dark tunnel…to the room.
He came at them with the pistol blazing. They were ready for him, warned by the fleeing coward, and they shot at him and hit him more than once from their hiding places. He saw where they were hiding-one crouched astride the open doorway, one prone beside the chair, the third standing behind the wooden post that kept the ceiling of the ancient room from caving in. Without adequate training and the requisite balls, however, felling a target shooting back from close range was one of the most challenging tasks in combat, and these men were no match for the addict seeking his next hit.
Bullets whinging and pocking on the wall and floor around him, Cooper found his opponents to be pathetic, the cowards generating miss after miss. He was struck in the left forearm and outer thigh, but with the pain tolerance he’d developed-that they’d fostered in him-he didn’t even notice. With the five shots he had remaining in the revolver, the addict went five-for-five against the three opponents. He knew exactly who each man was: the guard who had fled in the passageway had been the one feeding him the crusty tortillas; the one beside the chair was the one who had whipped and strafed him; the one behind the post, the man with the mustache, was the one who’d always done the talking as the other whipped him with the serrated paddle from hell.
Two bullets made it into each of Whip-man and Tortilla, one into Mustache. The direct hits disabled them, and they fell, and whether two of them had survived the initial bullet strikes, Cooper had never known. He knew that Mustache had not been killed, because he gutted him with the machete while the man screamed and flailed on the floor. He laid waste to the other two in like fashion, Cooper screaming, a constant yell, as though he held no need for breath in the process of emitting the steady, curdling wail that escaped his throat. When he was through with the men, he took to the chair-the chair-and killed it with the machete like he had the men. When he had chopped it to pieces, he took all of the guns in the room and emptied them at the remaining pieces of the chair, blasting away until each revolver clicked on an empty chamber. Until there were no more bullets to shoot with.
In the process of his committing these inhuman murders, the door of the chamber had somehow eased shut. He remembered seeing this, feeling the deep cringe of ungodly fear, as though the devil himself had closed the door and would shortly be setting the oven to broil. He’d made an impossible escape, accomplished vengeful, disturbingly satisfying retaliation-and yet it seemed he would remain trapped for eternity in the chamber of horrors.
He dropped the first man’s severed head, which he realized only then he had held on to throughout; he dropped the pistol he’d just exhausted. Then he scrambled for the door, slipped, and fell. On his face. And hands-he remembered his hands from that moment, the sight of them in the torch-lit room, because he found them coated in blood when he looked at them. Dipped and soaked to well above the wrists. He felt the same blood dripping from his face, and chin, and neck, and as he stood, he saw that he had become coated with it, with the blood of his enemies, that he was standing in a puddle of it, of the blood he had shed, a puddle the edge of which he could not see. His shoeless feet were immersed in it, toes nearly covered.
He slipped and skidded through the blood, all but wading, as though he were dreaming of trying to run through quicksand. He grasped the handle of the door, the handle he had wanted so badly to grasp all those times, and his hands slipped on it, and he thought for a terrifying moment that it was locked, that he had somehow locked himself in, but then he tried it again and it opened.
He didn’t know which way to go, but he knew that if he followed the lost light he could find his way, that hint of daylight reaching through the darkness and the torches lighting the tunnels, the drab gray mist of daylight brighter around each succeeding corner and stairwell, and then there was a massive wooden door with a round, windowless opening in the center, and he grasped its handle with his bloodied hand, pulled it inward, and felt the blinding assault of equatorial sunshine on eyes that hadn’t seen daylight in months. He collapsed from the blinding daylight-the pain striking him in his eyes, a place he was not accustomed to feeling pain.
He rose slowly, recovering-squinting, so that he saw the world only through the miniscule slivers between his interlaced eyelashes.
Then he ran.
Somebody saw him, shot at him from above, and hit him in the back. The shot knocked him down, but he got up again, and found he could still breathe, and still run. So he did. He ran until he could only walk, walked until he could only crawl, crawled until he collapsed, then awoke to the sounds of a river, the river he had known from the operations maps would be to the east, assuming they had kept him anywhere near where he’d been caught. That was the direction he had tried to run. Twenty miles, thirty, fifty-he had no idea, but he heard it, then found it-the Rio Sulaco. As he fell into it, the thousands of mosquitoes that had been feasting on him separated and floated away in a grimy cloud on the surface of the wide, gentle tributary.
A mile downstream he whacked his head on a boulder, passed out, and didn’t remember a goddamn thing from the next three years of his life.
Journey complete, Cooper sat on the last plank of the dock. He took his pole, disengaged the hook from the guide nearest the reel, then set the pole down until he’d dug out one of the worms from the bucket and slid it, wriggling, full bore onto the hook. Then he took the pole, pointed it out over the water, flipped the catch on the reel, and slowed the pace of the hook-and-weight’s drop into the water with his thumb pressed against the spool of filament. When he felt the weight hit bottom, he flipped the catch back into place, reeled in about a foot and a half of line, and set the pole across his lap. He draped his arm across the pole and clasped it in his hand midway up the pole.
Cooper was doing the food-chain thing, a sort of timed experiment he liked to do from this decrepit dock, situated around the corner from Conch Bay. The old man with the goats had built the dock maybe twenty-five years ago, then let it fall into utter disrepair. Cooper would walk over the hill behind the club, stop and dig for worms or sand shrimp, and head down to the dock. He could usually wrangle about a dozen baitfish in under an hour; once he caught the smaller fish, he got serious, switching out the original hook and weight for some heavier drag, a bigger, barbed hook, and a steel leader.