King Rat

It’s amputate or die. Simple. And when it comes down to it, you can’t die. Not yet. Once you’re born, you are obligated to survive. At all costs.

Peter Marlowe had known a lot of pain. And when you know a thing, intimately, you know its limitations and its color and its moods. With practice — and courage — you can let yourself slip into pain and then the pain is not bad, only a welling, controllable. Sometimes it is even good.
But this pain was beyond agony.

To hell with trying to live without food. Without hope. I want to die. How much I want to die.

“Ah, well,” she said aloud, for now that she had been alone so long she often talked to herself, “kittens have nine lives so there’s no need to worry. They’re luckier than humans, much luckier. Or perhaps they’re unluckier. Perhaps it is better to have only one life.”

You got to look after number one, Peter. No one else does.”

The Gurkhas were loyal to a man, under torture and indignity. So Colonel Brant wept for his men, the men he would have died for, the men he still died for.