Revolution No.9

by Neil Mcmahon

  Rested, he worked to balance the complex equation of factors and probabilities they faced. The storm seemed to be subsiding, at least temporarily. The visible fire was a risk, the more so as the snow diminished, but the heat was essential, and the longer their clothes could dry, the better. But if the snow stopped, they were going to leave a trail that, come daylight, would be highly visible. A man on a vantage point, with optics, could probably see it from miles away.

  If Marguerite was feeling strong enough, it was time to move on again.

  He set the rifle upright against the wall and got out the insulin and syringes. He drew a three-unit shot and knelt beside the little boy nestled in her embrace. She had been wetting his mouth every so often, and she watched with anxious eyes as Monks pinched up a fold of skin over Mandrake’s abdomen and slid in the needle.

  “Are you up to starting again?” he asked her.

  “I guess so.”

  “If you’re not sure, we’ll wait.”

  “No. I’m okay now. This helped a lot.”

  “Then let’s pack up.”

  Monks gathered her clothes and gave them to her. They were far from completely dry, but at least they were no longer soaked. Without the pelting rain and wet snow, body heat would help to dry them further. He got his own shirt and jeans, and then realized that she hadn’t moved. Her head was bowed, her face hidden by her hair.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “He’s looking for us.” Her voice was muffled and tremulous. “He’s getting into my head. That’s how he’ll find us.”

  Monks stared at her in disbelief. “You mean Freeboot?”

  “He’s telling me I should just wait here. He’ll come get me.”

  He knelt beside her and gripped her wrist.

  “Marguerite, you’re imagining this,” he said. “You’re stressed out, maybe feeling guilty. But Freeboot’s not getting into your head. He might have made you believe he can do that, but he can’t, not really. Nobody can.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  It was the same insane conviction that Monks had heard from Glenn.

  “You can’t stay here, are you kidding?” Monks said. “If he doesn’t find you, you’ll die. If he does, he’ll-God knows what he’ll do.”

  She shook her head, with childlike stubbornness. “No. It’s all okay, he forgives me.”

  Monks squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, trying to think of a way to cut through the invisible spiderweb that Freeboot had strung around his followers.

  “What about Hammerhead?” Monks said. “You think he’ll forgive you?”

  “He wouldn’t dare cross Freeboot,” she said, looking up scornfully. “Besides, I can make Hammerhead do anything I want.”

  “But you’ll have to start sleeping with him again. And the other maquis. Right? Anybody who wants you, isn’t that the deal?”

  She bowed her head again, averting her eyes.

  “But you only want Freeboot, really,” Monks said. “He uses you like a whore for his men, and he plays around with other women.”

  For thirty seconds, she was silent and still. Monks was abruptly aware of the piney fragrance of the fire, the dark flush that the heat had brought to her skin, the golden-downed bumps of her spine the length of her long graceful back.

  Then, in a low voice, she said, “He says he has the right to every woman he wants, because he’s the alpha male. He was fucking around tonight. I knew he was going to. I got pissed.”

  “Was that the business he had to take care of?”

  “He does it all the time. There’s these big parties every couple of months. Everybody from camp goes down to the flats to score dope.”

  Monks had figured out by now that “the flats” referred to the rest of the world outside the camp. But while he didn’t know much about drug deals, he had never thought of them as social events.

  “What kind of parties?” he said.

  “People around here get permits to grow medical marijuana. It’s supposed to be for their own use, but other people come up from the cities. Bikers, black gang guys. They bring crank, crack, whatever, and everybody trades. And there’s always young girls around,” she added venomously.

  So that was where Freeboot had been while his son was dying.

  “Did Motherlode go, too?” Monks asked.

  “Yeah,” Marguerite said, still caustic. “She kept saying that as soon as she stocked up, she was going to come back and be with Mandrake. She’s full of shit. All she cares about is her dope.”

  There was no point in asking if Glenn had gone. Monks knew the answer.

  “Marguerite, you did the right thing,” he said. “For Mandrake, for me, for yourself. Keep on doing it. We just have to make it a little farther, and then Freeboot can never touch you again.”

  She shook her head. “I was wrong. I belong to him. You go on, I’m staying here.”

  Options flashed through Monks’s frayed mind, including herding her at gunpoint. But what could he do if she refused-shoot her? He decided on one more try at reason. If that didn’t work, he could only hope to make it out himself and send back help.

  “What can Freeboot do to you from far away?” he said. “How can he hurt you?”

  She finally met Monks’s gaze. Her eyes were wet with frightened tears.

  “It’s not even like being scared of dying,” she said. “It’s like he’ll be in your mind forever, making you live in hell.”

  “Then how come he’s not doing it to me?”

  She shrugged warily, her full breasts rising and falling.

  “Because it’s all just something he’s made you believe,” Monks repeated emphatically. “We’ll get him out of your head for good, I promise.” He squeezed her wrist, managing one of his crocodilian smiles. “I always hate to see a pretty girl put her clothes back on, but we’ve got to move.”

  She smiled back, a quick, timid twitch of her lips. Monks seized the moment.

  “Here, this will jump-start us,” he said. He reached for his jacket and pulled out the little jar of meth. Mixing speed and hypothermia might be a bad idea, but at this point, he was willing to risk anything. Marguerite was slow to accept it, maybe sensing that it would goad her out of her passivity. But then she unscrewed the lid and bent over it to inhale.

  Monks did the same. It occurred to him that this was, in all probability, the only time in his life that he would crouch naked beside a fire in the wilderness with a lovely young woman, doing illegal drugs.

  He pressed his palm against her cheek.

  “Now come on,” he said. “The kid needs you.”

  She wavered for another several seconds, but then nodded. She set Mandrake down and started pulling on her clothes.

  Monks closed his eyes in relief.

  21

  His feet hurt like hell. The wet, loose pull-on boots had chewed them into blistered lumps of flesh that he picked up and put down, one in front of the other, in a dull, trudging cadence without end. Marguerite slogged along silently ahead of him, so he could keep her in sight in case she weakened again. The snow had stopped, and what was on the ground had lightened to a film of slush, but the terrain was still rough. At least he could be sure now that they were traveling in a straight line.

  It was just after noon. He estimated that they had made it twenty-some miles from camp, now descending a series of ridgebacks in a direction he was pretty sure was west, where Marguerite thought the nearest highway lay. The clouds had lifted enough for him to navigate by a general sense of the terrain sloping down toward the ocean, moss growing on the north side of the trees, and an occasional glimpse of faint lighter streaks behind the dark shifting tapestry of gray, indicating the path of the sun. But they still obscured any long-range vistas, and they presented the kind of threat that kept experienced outdoors people uneasy. He looked up constantly, trying to gauge what was coming. It seemed to him that the clouds were thickening again, suggesting another storm moving in. Often,
several of them lined up out on the Pacific like batters in a dugout, waiting for their turn to step up to the plate and lash the countryside.

  Monks knew that both he and Marguerite were getting close to collapsing again. Even if they could find shelter, he wasn’t at all sure that they would recover this time. But there had to be a road before too much longer.

  There was nothing to do but keep lifting up those feet and putting them down, one after the other.

  Marguerite stopped abruptly, raising her head.

  Monks had heard it, too-a human voice.

  He stood motionless, listening hard, trying to convince himself that the sound had been a tree branch snapping under its snow load, or a raven’s caw.

  But he knew the truth, and a few seconds later, it came again-a man’s voice, shouting, as if calling to someone else.

  Marguerite swung to face him. Her eyes burned with fear and accusation.

  “I told you he’d find us!” she half-sobbed.

  Monks shushed her angrily with a wave of his hand, and stepped close.

  “Come on, keep moving,” he whispered hoarsely. “Stay in the trees. And stay quiet.”

  She turned and hurried on. Monks followed, with disbelief washing through him-along with rage, the feeling of being cheated. He had started to believe that whatever their other troubles might be, they had finally eluded pursuit, that last night’s heavy snow and today’s melting had wiped out their trail. He didn’t believe for a second that Freeboot had zeroed in on Marguerite’s thoughts, like a radar beam. The maquis had probably spotted some tracks from a vantage point, as he had feared, and found enough vestiges to follow.

  In this vast rugged landscape, it still seemed astounding.

  There were at least two voices, maybe more. They continued to sound at intervals, no doubt following the clear line of tracks in the snow. The distance was hard to gauge-at least a mile, he guessed, and hoped to Christ farther. In a silent alpine forest, voices could carry a very long way.

  But one thing became clear within the next hour. They were gaining, fast.

  Monks turned his head, listening over his own panting breath. He was sure that the pursuers were within a half-mile by now.

  When he turned back, he saw that Marguerite had stopped on top of a rise and was pointing a shaking finger ahead, like an ancient explorer, long lost at sea, finally sighting land.

  He hurried to her side. Below, cutting across the mountain bases, lay the dark curving scar of a paved road.

  He put his hands on his hips and bent over, breathing deeply, trying to relax and think. The distance to the road looked like about two miles. Staying on the ridgeline, they could make it in an hour. But that terrain was wide open, and a half-mile was easy shooting range for high-powered rifles.

  The only other way that he could see was to drop down into the ravine that lay to the north-just the kind of situation that he had been trying to avoid. It would be choked with undergrowth and deadfall, and he could see the dark glimmer of a stream at its bottom, water that might be too deep and fast to cross. But the thick brush would provide cover, and without that, they were dead.

  “We’re going to make it,” he told Marguerite, gripping her shoulders. “I’ll go first now. Stay close.”

  Then a gunshot cracked through the silent air, the sharp echoing boom of a large-caliber rifle. A man yelled something. Monks could not make out the words, but the tone was menacing, and Marguerite flinched.

  Without doubt, the voice was Freeboot’s.

  The ravine’s bottom narrowed into a gorge with sheer granite walls twenty feet deep. What was probably a lazy stream or even dry in most weather had become a small river, tossing dead branches along its frothing course at the speed of a man trotting.

  Monks stared down at it. He had led them into the trap he had been fearing. Unless they found a ford close by, there was no way they were going to get across this one.

  The gunshots behind them were frequent now, some of them full automatic bursts, crashing through the thick tree branches. None of them were coming close-Monks didn’t think that the maquis had seen them yet. The rifle fire was intended to scare them into giving up, and Marguerite looked ready to. She was lagging behind, forcing him to wait for her and hiss encouragement. Physically, they were both on their last legs. But he knew that she was giving in to Freeboot’s imagined psychic power, too.

  Monks bulled his way through the brush along the gorge’s narrow granite shelf, looking back every few seconds to make sure that she was still behind him, snapping branches with his hands to clear them out of her way. They passed one place where a section of bank had caved into the stream to form a stepping-stone bridge. It invited tormentingly, but extended only halfway across.

  After fifteen minutes, he realized that some of the gunshots were coming from ahead of them, not behind. The maquis had fanned out on the ridge above. When they started dropping down into the ravine, it would be like a closing fist, with their prey in the middle of it.

  He turned back, gripping Marguerite by the wrist and yanking her along to the rockslide they had passed. The half-dozen boulders that stuck up above the water’s writhing surface would get them halfway. That was the best they were going to find. He pulled her close and clamped his arm around her waist. This time he couldn’t trust her to hang on to his belt.

  He waded in with her, staying upstream of the rocks, using them to brace himself against the icy current. When they got to the last one, he yelled into her ear, “We’re going!” and lunged toward the far bank. The waist-high wall of water slammed into him, splashing up to blind him and spinning him around. His flailing free hand found the slippery branch of a fallen tree. He clung to it, fighting to get his footing back, and pulled them forward another yard. Then he saw that a leg-sized chunk of dead wood was tumbling downstream toward them. He managed to throw one leg over the trunk of the fallen tree, then let go of the branch to fend off the rushing log, but it swung around with his push and gave him a hard blow to the ribs.

  Gasping, he worked his way along the tree, straddling it to anchor them. It ended within six feet of the far bank, but that was six feet of seething torrent, and his numb right arm was losing its grip on Marguerite.

  “Get there and grab something!” he screamed at her. “I’ll hold you!” He pulled her in front of him and shoved her forward with everything he had left, lunging along downstream of her to brace her. Her hands clawed at the slick rocks of the bank, slipping and pulling several loose.

  Monks got his feet under him and heaved her forward again. This time, she got both hands on a solid chunk of granite. With him pushing, she crawled up enough to wrap her arms around it. Gripping her jacket, he pulled himself up, too. On hands and knees, they scrambled to solid ground and fell flat.

  Then a burst of gunfire from the opposite bank stitched across the cliff above them, showering them with shards of granite.

  “Move,” he yelled, slapping at Marguerite’s legs. He yanked the pack off and clutched Mandrake in front of him, running to dive into the bank’s thick brush. Keeping cover, they clawed their way up the bank, with gunfire spraying around them.

  Finally, they pulled themselves over the top and into the shelter of trees.

  Monks set Mandrake on the ground and lay down beside him. The little boy’s face was pale as frost and looked crumpled, like a paper mask that had gotten soaked. But he was breathing.

  Monks rolled onto his back.

  “You okay?” he said to Marguerite.

  She nodded slowly, like someone not yet completely awake from an intense dream.

  He wormed his way behind a tree close to the bank. He could see the stream for half a mile in each direction. The rockslide they’d crossed was the only possible ford. He reckoned that the road couldn’t be more than a mile from here, over open, almost level forest. Now it came down to getting there before the maquis could cut them off.

  This was a hell of a lot better chance than he had been expecting.

>   He scooped up Mandrake and thrust him into Marguerite’s arms.

  Her eyes were shining, with water or tears.

  “You’ve got to get to that road fast,” he said, turning her to face it. “I know you’re whipped, but it’s not far. Flag down a car and call the sheriffs.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked anxiously.

  “Put a stopper in the bottleneck.”

  He gave her a gentle push, then crawled back to his vantage point and scanned the opposite bank with the rifle’s scope, searching for signs of movement. Within a few seconds, he saw a small fir twitch, a hundred yards to the west and halfway up the bank. He trained the scope on the spot. A man wearing camouflage was sliding cautiously downhill under cover of the brush.

  Monks looked for others. His peripheral vision caught a small tumble of rocks and mud, this time to the east-another man coming down the slope. The two of them were advancing in a sort of pincer movement, with the stream ford between them. He couldn’t see either of their faces, but he could see their rifles.

  He judged that it would take them three or four minutes to reach the ford. Then they would be exposed. A litany of doubts started in his brain. He was not expert enough to deliberately wound. It was either fire warning shots or risk killing. He had only ever killed one man, in desperate self-defense, and he had fervently hoped never to come close to that again.

  But he shoved the worries aside. They were not something he could afford right now. Then he remembered the amoral euphoria that the meth induced. He unscrewed the container, dipped in the knife, and sucked up a solid jolt.

  With the rush blossoming through his brain, he took the extra ammunition clips from his belt and arranged them next to him, set the rifle’s selector switch to single shot, and clicked off the safety.

  Through the scope, he watched the nearer maquis, the one to the west, stretch out his right leg and brace his boot against a tree stump, lowering himself another step downhill. His thigh made a good-sized, clear target. Monks braced his elbows on the ground. Slowly, squeezing, he touched off the round.