Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [75]
A dark hole gushed like slashed fruit in the Vietnamese officer’s forehead. The Lizard Man’s mouth dropped open to show broken, ugly yellow teeth. A lathering, pale white tongue flopped out.
David Hudson reflexively fired the service revolver a second time.
He fired a third time.
He felt like a weary, wildly confused child—playing with a toy gun. Bang, bang, bang.
He thrust the point of the revolver directly in the frozen eyes of the guard who had provided the weapon. The man’s face shattered. Skull, flesh, bone flew apart.
Another Viet Cong guard was shot in the throat.
The two remaining guards had dropped their liquor bottles; they were struggling to get out holstered pistols.
The next three deafening gunshots tore through one man’s chest, pierced the other’s stomach, then his heart. The foul-smelling, boiling jungle hut was suddenly a bloody abattoir.
Then Hudson was running outside the command hut. He limped badly on legs that felt like they couldn’t actually be his.
He stumbled, scrambled forward on the unfamiliar, unsteady supports. His legs were like wooden stilts.
Every object he saw seemed part of a blurred, impossible dream. Everywhere he looked, there was harsh unreality. A late-afternoon sun flared orange and bright red over the wall of jungle green. Screeching monkeys skittered away from the place of so many gunshots. Insects buzzed between the trees.
David Hudson awkwardly weaved back and forth across the exposed exercise yard.
He ducked into the thick jungle that kept threatening to swallow up the prison camp, and served as a natural barrier to escape for all the prisoners. Hudson lunged forward. He tripped ahead anyway.
He had no choice now.
Nowhere to go but into the terrifying jungle.
He was breathless already, clumsily crashing against trees, against thick, tangled jungle brush. He kept running, faster than he thought possible.
Dizziness grabbed and clawed at him. Whirling bright colors came. Shivering cold flashes.
He kept running, zigzagging forward, vomiting bile like it was exhaust. As the jungle foliage got thicker, the trail became darker than he thought possible—almost complete blackness less than five hundred yards from the Vietnamese camp.
He ran forward anyway. A half mile, a mile—he had no idea of either time or space now.
A paralyzing thought struck at him and suddenly held David Hudson tight as the final grip of death. They weren‘t even chasing him …. They weren’t even giving chase back into the jungle.
Hudson continued running—falling, picking himself up, falling, picking himself up, falling, picking himself up.
Then it was so dark there was nothing left in the world. Hudson kept running. Falling, picking himself up.
Falling, picking himself up.
Falling, falling, falling …
A song from the Doors played in his head. “Horse Latitudes” … then nothing at all …
Hudson woke with a nightmarish jolt. A silent scream never made it out of his tight, dry larynx.
Long grass was stuck to one side of his face. Sticky, gummy tears had formed in his half-closed eyes.
Fat black flies had attached themselves to his lips and nostrils. Hundreds of black flies were plastered all over his body.
Trying to right himself, he nearly laughed out loud. It was exactly as he’d always believed this putrid affair called life to be: resolutely unfair, pointless in the end, and in the beginning, and in the middle, too. Anyone with any reason could see the absurd eternal pattern. David Hudson fell away into the unrelenting darkness once again. “Horse Latitudes” played again. Why that fucking song now?
He woke again. Wildly confused. Unnaturally alert.
He had to concentrate everything, every trace of energy he had now. He wrestled with himself to stay awake, to hold on to a thin, sane lifeline. Tormenting waves, disconnected images and thoughts kept coming. Ghosts just beyond his full comprehension. Raging rivers of shadowy, half-formed