First Blood (Rambo: First Blood Series Book 1)

by David Morrell

He had set out to show a fight to anyone who pushed him anymore, and that was quite different—not ethical, but personal, emotional.

What he should have done was cherish more smiling girls and drink more icy water and taste more summer melons.

Well, if God was, He could not fault him for being true to his disbelief.

There’s only one way to do this, and that’s for somebody like me who doesn’t have a hope anyhow to go in and take him.

No passive lapse into nothing. No lit fuse, self disruption. But this way, the only proper way, in the last of the fight, trying his best to kill Teasle.

But he could not fake it. He had to try as hard as he could.

Then death took him over, but it was not at all the stupefying sleep, bottomless and murky, that he had expected. It was more like what he had expected from the dynamite, but coming from his head instead of his stomach, and he could not understand why it should be like that, and it frightened him.

“Me. I guess it was me. I took the top of his head off with this shotgun.” “What’s it like for you?” “Better than when I knew he was in pain.” “Yes.”

He thought about the kid, and flooded with love for him, and just a second before the empty shell would have completed its arc to the ground, he relaxed, accepted peacefully. And was dead.

“The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,”