by Neil Mcmahon
They waited in silence broken only by the crackling of the fire, the rustle of shifting bodies, and the wind, rising and falling like the breath of a sinister god. A minute passed, then another and another, each lasting sixty very long seconds.
Then came a sudden disturbance, a sense of movement rather than sound, from the cliff above. Monks just had time to look up and see a large object plummet down. It landed in the fire with a crash, scattering an explosion of embers and sparks. He stumbled backwards, aware of the other figures doing the same, some hitting the ground and rolling, others swinging their weapons around into play.
He hit the ground, too. As the sparks settled, he strained his vision to identify what had landed in the fire. It was an animal, a big one. An acrid burning smell was starting to rise, overpowering the pleasant piney scent of woodsmoke.
“You can dress ’ em up. But can you take ’em out?”
The voice was Freeboot’s, coming from outside the clearing. It had a chiding, sardonic tone. “You assholes let anybody else come up on you like that, you’re all going to need wigs before this night’s over.”
He walked into view with his barefoot, easy stride. The men lowered their weapons and shifted uneasily, like children being scolded. Monks got up off the ground. He saw that the animal was a young mule deer buck, three or four point, its antlered head twisted at a radical angle from its body courtesy of its gaping slashed throat. Freeboot’s hands and torso were streaked with blood, and the right leg of his jeans was soaked with it. Apparently he had carried the buck over that shoulder while its veins emptied out, then thrown it off the cliff.
“There’s just two ways you can live in this world,” Freeboot announced, his voice strident now. “You take control of it, or it takes control of you. Most of those people out there”-he swept his arm in a gesture that included the rest of the world-“are like this deer. But you few men here, you got the chance to be above all that.”
He crouched over the buck with a long survival knife, using its serrated edge to saw from the buck’s throat down through its sternum, then flipping the blade to slit the belly to the genitals. The entrails slithered out in a steaming slippery mass. His hands plunged in, forcing the rib cage open, then going in again with the knife.
“Out in the jungle, the tribes got secret societies that control everything,” he called out, hands working to cut something free. His voice was powerful and resonant, like a revival preacher’s. “They name themselves for hunters, the strongest and fastest. Cheetahs. Leopards. They understand that life is power, and that taking life gives them power.”
He stood, holding up the buck’s heart in one hand. It was about the size of a man’s fist, ruddy and glistening in the fire’s glow.
“Here we think we’re civilized. But it’s really just another jungle, made of freeways and shopping malls. When you go out into it, you got to have the heart of the hunter, and eat the heart of the deer.”
Freeboot sliced into the heart with his knife, cut off a three inch long strip, and put it in his mouth. He chewed slowly, taking his time, pointedly making eye contact with each of the men in turn. They stared back at him, mesmerized. He swallowed the raw flesh, raising his chin so that all could see his larynx move. Then he stepped to the man closest to him, Hammerhead, and offered him the bloody heart.
Hammerhead took it without hesitation, cut off another strip, and crammed it into his mouth. He passed the heart on to the next man. The smell of the buck’s charring hair and flesh was getting stronger, an evil, atavistic reek of carnage.
Monks had read about the secret societies that Freeboot touted. He had also read that children being initiated were sometimes forced to eat human flesh-even of their own murdered parents. It was a dark, mystical communion, intended to bond them to the group in a way that plunged into the most savage roots of mankind.
The heart circulated to more of the black-clad warriors, each man hacking off a chunk and chewing, until it came to one that Monks hadn’t seen before, a lanky young man with a big Adam’s apple. He took it hesitantly, his gaze darting around.
“You got a problem, Sidewinder?” Freeboot barked.
Monks recalled that he had heard the name Sidewinder before-the sentry who had taken over for Captain America. There was something viperish about him-his tongue flicked in and out constantly to wet his lips, and his sinuous body seemed to vibrate with vaguely menacing energy.
“Can this make you sick?” he blurted out. “Eating raw meat like this?”
Monks realized, with astonishment, that Sidewinder was talking to him.
“What?” It was Freeboot who answered, erupting in incredulous outrage.
“I heard this dude’s a doctor,” Sidewinder stammered. “I just thought-you know, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this, in case there’s diseases or something.”
“‘In case there’s diseases or something,’” Freeboot mimicked viciously. “Diseases are for the two-legged deer running around out there. Is that what you want to be, one of them? Get your ass over here.”
Sidewinder jumped to obey the command, tongue flicking nervously. Freeboot wrenched the heart out of his hand and tossed it to Hammerhead.
“Strip,” Freeboot commanded.
“Oh, man. Why?”
“You don’t fucking ask me why when I tell you to do something, shitheel. You do it.”
The gathered men watched tensely as Sidewinder sat on the ground, unlaced his boots and pulled them off, then got out of his fatigues. Naked, he looked thin and pathetic, his skin made paler by his darkened face.
Freeboot kicked the carcass. “You want to be a deer? Fine. Put that on. You got balls, you can stand up and walk around. Otherwise, crawl in and lay there.”
For a few more silent minutes, the group watched Sidewinder wrestle the buck out of the fire, clumsily finish cutting loose the entrails, then struggle to stand with the carcass over his shoulders like a cape. Even gutted, it would weigh well over a hundred pounds.
Finally, he staggered to his feet, the antlered head lolling on his chest and the hind legs dragging behind his own.
“You want to be a hunter again?” Freeboot said to him.
Sidewinder nodded miserably.
Freeboot took the deer’s heart back from Hammerhead, hacked off a slice, and stuffed it into Sidewinder’s mouth. He chewed for what seemed an interminably long time, before he managed, gagging, to swallow it.
“You stay in the woods tonight,” Freeboot said. “You can have your man skin back tomorrow. Now get the fuck out of here.”
Sidewinder shuffled painfully off into the dark forest, wrapped in his bloody burden. At least, Monks thought, it would keep him warm.
“I’ve told you about the Old Man of the Mountain and his assassins,” Freeboot boomed out to the others. “Let me tell you how much his men trusted him. He could point at one of them standing guard high up on a cliff, and snap his fingers, and that man would jump off. And because of that trust, they could make any king in the world do whatever they wanted. But if any one man does not trust, it weakens all the others. That, we will not tolerate. Anybody else got a problem with trust?” He stared from face to face.
The deer’s heart finished making the rounds, with no more hesitations or questions. When it came full circle, back to Freeboot, he tossed the remains into the fire.
Monks didn’t know if there was danger in eating the raw flesh, but he was relieved to see it go. He had feared that he might be expected to join in.
“Everybody get behind a good hard hit of this eyeball,” Freeboot said. He took out the Copenhagen can of speed that Monks had seen before, dipping in his knife blade and inhaling. The others all did the same, breaking out their private stashes, in a parody of a military smoke break.
“Now, you better run hard tonight, and you better run fast,” Freeboot said. “Some of you haven’t done this before, so here’s how it goes. You move up a rank for every chunk of hair you bring back. You lose your own hair, you move down a ra
nk. No guns, just knives and Mace. No drawing blood. If you get Maced, don’t fight back, ’cause knives can slip. Okay, stack up your firearms.”
The men came forward one at a time, laying their rifles and pistols at Freeboot’s feet. Some looked self-assured, others apprehensive.
“You’ll hear a gunshot in ten minutes,” Freeboot said. “That’s when it starts. You come back with somebody else’s hair or without your own. That’s when it ends.”
He snapped his fingers. The men took off in crouching runs, scattering in different directions.
Abruptly, one of the figures veered like a football running back sidestepping a blocker, and lunged straight at Monks. He barely had time to raise his forearms, covering his torso like a boxer, before Hammerhead’s shoulder slammed into him. It knocked him sprawling, skidding on his tailbone.
Hammerhead charged on, never even slowing down.
Monks struggled to his feet, trying to get his breath back. Freeboot was watching him. It was the first time he had seemed aware that Monks was there.
“You’re a noncombatant, Rasp,” Freeboot said matter-off-actly. “But I’d get on back to camp, if I was you. Somebody’s likely to make a mistake.”
Monks started back along the trail at a fast walk. He had only gone about ten yards when he heard a voice hiss from the trees:
“There are no noncombatants.”
He spun around, searching the darkness with his gaze. The words had come from only a few feet away. But the speaker was invisible.
He headed toward camp again, this time at a jog.
The voice could have been a man’s, high-pitched or disguised, but he was almost sure it was Shrinkwrap’s.
10
Monks had just gotten inside the lodge when he heard a faint, faraway gunshot-the signal for a group of cranked-up young militants armed with knives and Mace to start hunting each other’s hair.
He leaned back against the wall, resting. The urge to keep running had been with him all the way. But his fear of getting caught and arousing Freeboot’s wrath outweighed his fear of staying on.
One thing was clear by now-Freeboot’s brand of trust had teeth.
Then there was Hammerhead. Monks had become the target of his anger, for reasons that didn’t much matter. What did matter was that the thin membrane of safety that Monks had started to feel had been shredded by Hammerhead’s shoulder-especially as Freeboot had watched it happen, and not said a word.
“He said you were going to bring him more soup,” someone said quietly.
Monks jerked toward the voice. Marguerite was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He realized that the he referred to Mandrake. She must have gone in to check on him.
“I’m heating it up,” she said. “I could fix you something, too.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“It’ll have to be another sandwich. They cook down at another place and bring it up, but right now there’s not much.”
“Anything but venison,” Monks said.
She looked puzzled, but then drifted back into the kitchen. Monks followed her, again smelling marijuana. A saucepan of broth for Mandrake was heating on top of the wood cookstove. She gave the pan a stir, then went to the refrigerator, taking out cold cuts and bread. There was a big supply of those; apparently, sandwiches were a staple here.
“It seems like you do all the work around this place,” Monks said.
“I don’t mind. It’s better than doing nothing.”
“That’s a pretty name. Marguerite.”
She did not seem displeased. “It’s not my real one.”
Monks was surprised. It was the only name he’d heard here that seemed normal.
“What is?”
She glanced at him warily. “I can’t tell you.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. Why Marguerite, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“There’s this old story, Faust? He sells his soul to the devil?”
Monks nodded encouragingly.
“Marguerite is, like, the woman who saves him at the end,” she said.
So-along with Freeboot’s vision of himself as part Spartacus and part Übermensch, there was a dash of Faust, who had dared to go beyond all limits.
“Is that how you see yourself, saving Freeboot?” Monks asked. “Faust made Marguerite put up with a lot of trouble along the way.”
“Hey, man, I didn’t pick it. Freeboot did.” This time her voice had an edge.
“Don’t get me wrong, I meant that as a compliment,” Monks said quickly. “In the story, Marguerite is very bighearted, very loyal.”
She ignored him, using a plastic knife to lather mayonnaise on a slice of white bread, then adding baloney and cheese. It was looking like lunch all over again.
But then she said, “He gives everybody a new name. It’s, like, getting rid of who you used to be and becoming a new person.”
“And all the names have a special meaning?”
“Kind of. He sees deep inside you, to who you really are.”
Monks made a quick mental tally of the names that he had heard. Some, like Hammerhead and Sidewinder, seemed to suggest that Freeboot hadn’t found much to work with in the way of deep character qualities. Coil, unsettling though Monks found it, did touch on Glenn’s intrinsic restlessness; and Shrinkwrap probably referred to her being a psychologist. Some of the others were more obscure.
“What about Captain America?” Monks said, watching to see if mentioning Marguerite’s lover seemed to strike a nerve.
She tossed her hair dismissively. “He’s good-looking, cool. There’s this old movie Freeboot likes, Easy Rider? It came from there.”
Monks called up a vague memory of the movie. The Peter Fonda character, that was it.
“I couldn’t help noticing that you and he seem, ah, close,” Monks said.
She shrugged. “He’s a maquis. I’m a bride.”
“I don’t understand what that means.”
“Ask Freeboot, okay?” she said, sounding edgy again. It seemed that this was sensitive turf. She put the sandwich on a plate and pushed it toward him. “There’s chips, and wine if you want it.”
“Thanks,” Monks said, moving a little closer to her as he picked up the plate. He was trying to zero in on the unhappiness he sensed in her-trying to gauge whether he could coax her into helping him. He decided to probe another sore spot that he had sensed.
“Motherlode told me she owned this place,” he said. “Is that true?”
“She inherited it.”
“Really?”
“Along with a trust fund the size of California. Her grandfather was a big logging guy.” Marguerite took a bowl from a cupboard and started pouring the warm broth into it.
“So she’s kind of the princess, and you’re the help?”
Marguerite didn’t answer, and her hair hid his view of her face. But her hands stopped moving.
“What does being a bride mean?” Monks said. “You sleep with anybody Freeboot tells you to? While he breaks in new brides?”
She left the room quickly, not speaking, clutching the bowl of soup in both hands.
Monks ate in front of the fireplace again, leaving her alone to feed Mandrake.
A few minutes later she came out of the bedroom and walked to the main door, still without looking at Monks. But when she reached it, she turned to him. Her eyes seemed defiant and perhaps fearful.
“I’m here because I want to be,” she said. “We all are.”
“Not Mandrake,” Monks said.
She hurried outside, slamming the door behind her.
And not me, he thought.
Freeboot waited beside the bonfire in the forest, silent, listening, attuned to the night. Occasionally, he dipped his knife blade into the canister of meth and inhaled it.
Twenty-four hours from now, Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Emlinger of Atherton, California, would join the list of assassination targets that were baffling police around the country.
The on
ly question was, which one of the men out stalking each other in the forest right now was going to earn the privilege of putting them on that list.
The answer came when a hulking figure lunged out of the tree line, running toward the fire like a charging bull. It was Hammerhead, the first man back-panting, face ruddy and shining with sweat, eyes glittering with crazed elation. His knife was clenched in his right fist. He thrust his left fist forward for Freeboot to see.
It held a thick swatch of Captain America ’s wavy blond hair.
Freeboot smiled.
He stepped to a niche in the rocky cliff and took out a silver goblet. It was filled with a special cocktail that he had invented: red wine saturated with finely powdered hashish and laced with XTC.
He walked back to the fire and handed the goblet to Hammerhead.
“Take this, brother, may it serve you well,” Freeboot said.
11
“You are no longer an ordinary human being, you understand that?” Freeboot hissed into Hammerhead’s ear. “The rules don’t apply to you no more. The human deer will cower before you. You will walk among them and be their master, yet none will know you. You are the best of the best, the top of the elite. You are on the edge of immortality.”
They strode along the dark foggy path toward the camp, Freeboot gripping the young man by the back of his belt to steer him. Hammerhead was lurching, his head weaving, wild-eyed, from side to side at the rush of perceptions flooding through his brain. Freeboot had been walking him around in the forest for half an hour, giving the drugs time to take hold, gauging his level of response. By now, Hammerhead was in a world that was hallucinatory, dreamlike, intensely heightened. His mind was wide open and defenseless. Freeboot was high, too, just enough to tune in to that but still stay firmly in control.
