by Neil Mcmahon
The rifle boomed and kicked hard against his shoulder. Above the roaring of the stream, he thought he heard a shriek. Quickly, he sighted in again. The man had his right knee pulled up to his chest, with hands clutching his ankle and blood spilling out from his boot between his fingers.
Not a great shot, but it had done the job.
He would have been easy to finish off, and Monks was thinking about it, when a burst of return fire smashed through the trees above him.
He flattened himself and wormed his way ten yards to another tree. The second maquis was hidden, but Monks remembered where he had been a few seconds ago. He flipped the selector switch to full automatic and touched the trigger again.
A half-dozen rounds burst from the barrel with blistering speed, spraying the brush on the ravine’s opposite bank like an invisible whiplash. The area remained still. Probably Monks had missed. But now that man knew he was spotted, and that might stop him from advancing.
There were other maquis, other ways they could get to Monks or around him. But a strange realization came to him, almost like being touched by something outside of himself. His fear was gone, and his fatigue had become a kind of relaxation that was casual, even pleasant-the sense of a long, hard journey almost over, just one more rough spot to go. He had done everything he could, and there was nothing left but to abandon himself to fate. He decided to stay where he was for an hour, giving Marguerite time to get to the road, and shoot anyone he saw. If he was still alive, he would try to make it there himself.
He was jerked abruptly from this comfortable state by realizing that a man had appeared across the stream.
It was Freeboot. Barefoot.
Monks shook his head hard, thinking that the meth had him hallucinating. But when he looked again, Freeboot was still there. Once again, he had materialized out of nowhere.
He was standing in full view at the rock bridge, making no attempt to hide. He carried an assault rifle in one hand, barrel angling down toward the ground. Although there was no way that he could see Monks, he was staring directly at where Monks lay.
Monks raised his rifle barrel an inch at a time. He planted his elbows again and centered the scope on Freeboot’s chest. The selector switch was still on full auto. His finger touched the trigger and slowly started to tighten.
Then stopped.
He lowered the rifle, climbed to his feet, and stepped out from behind the tree. Now Freeboot could see him.
For thirty seconds, the two men stood with gazes locked.
They had each other’s sons.
With feral quickness, Freeboot swung his rifle up, the muzzle pointing to the sky, and fired off a long, shuddering burst that spoke all the words that would never be told of rage, defeat, admiration-a challenge to the next duel.
He turned and loped back up the ravine’s bank, vanishing into the brush.
Monks turned, too, and started for the road. There was no need to stay, now.
He had been right, it was an easy hike of not much more than half an hour. A woman with a child should have had no trouble flagging down a ride. He stopped on top of the last small rise, watching for flashing lights, listening for sirens or a helicopter.
But there was no sound but the restless wind, no vehicles or human beings in sight in this deserted place on this desolate afternoon.
New fears entered his heart: that Marguerite had gotten turned around in the forest, or worse, been picked up by someone dangerous.
After a few minutes, civilization finally appeared in the form of a passing car, a recent-model Nissan or Toyota. A minute or two after that, a delivery truck went by in the other direction. Monks assured himself that Marguerite and Mandrake were fine. He had been in Freeboot’s camp too long. The world outside of it was filled with normal people, not violent psychotics, and the odds that she had run into trouble were a million to one. Getting help was just taking longer than his impatient imagination was allowing.
But as more time passed, and the sky faded toward dusk, he started to suspect that wherever Marguerite had gone, whatever she had done, she had not sent any sheriffs his way.
22
The logging truck slowed at Monks’s waves, then pulled over fifty yards down the road. It was the fourth vehicle that he had tried to flag down. The others had swerved and accelerated past him. He couldn’t blame them-he had stashed the rifle behind a tree, but still, no one was likely to stop in the middle of nowhere for a man who looked like he did. But loggers tended to be bolder than ordinary citizens.
He ran to the truck with stiff, heavy steps. It was grime-spattered, the big tires caked with reddish brown mud, the load of fir trunks crusted with snow. The driver, a full-bearded man wearing suspenders and a baseball cap, rolled down his window warily.
“Call the sheriffs,” Monks shouted. He slowed to a walk, breathing hard. “There’s armed men up in those woods. They were hunting me.”
The driver studied him for a few seconds, as if trying to gauge just how crazy Monks was. Then he reached forward to the dash and came back with his CB radio handset.
“Tell them to send a helicopter,” Monks said. “There’s a camp up there, twenty miles in. A group of people, run by a man named Freeboot.”
This seemed to get the driver’s attention. “The Harbine camp?” he said, holding the handset poised.
“I don’t know what it’s called. A dozen old log buildings, at the end of a dirt road.”
The driver nodded curtly, then spoke into the handset: “Breaker, this is Dahlgren Logging truck eleven. Got an emergency on Highway 162, near mile marker seventeen. Do you copy?” The language was a weird echo of the maquis’ pseudo-military code. Monks reminded himself that he was back in the real world.
A static-laden, squawking reply came from the radio. Monks couldn’t make out the words over the diesel’s steady rumble. The driver turned away from him and spoke with his voice lowered. An SUV with a young couple and skis on the rack passed by, giving the truck a wide berth.
The driver leaned out the window. “They want some more information.”
Monks flogged his exhausted brain for the right thing to say, to convince law-enforcement officials to send out a helicopter on the word of a disheveled, shouting lunatic standing in the middle of a road.
“There’s a young woman with a sick little boy, who were with me. She should have called them by now.”
The driver relayed the information, then shook his head. “They ain’t heard anything like that.”
Monks pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “Tell them to call the area hospitals, ambulance services, any medical facilities. The kid’s almost dead from diabetes. Maybe she took him straight in.”
The driver eyed him distrustfully, but spoke into the handset again. “It’s going to take a minute,” he told Monks when he finished.
Monks paced, bracing himself to learn that Marguerite and Mandrake had disappeared.
But almost immediately, the driver got a callback, then looked at Monks with cautious respect.
“An ambulance got called about forty minutes ago to pick up a little boy with diabetes, down near Longvale. But nobody said anything about coming out here.”
Monks closed his eyes in relief-Mandrake had made it. There was no telling about Marguerite, but that was another worry he couldn’t afford right now.
“Look, my name’s Monks, I’m a doctor,” he said to the logger. “I’ll give the sheriffs the whole story when they get here. But those people up there are going to try to escape. There need to be roadblocks, and for Christ’s sake, get that helicopter moving. Somebody might get killed.”
He decided not to add that the somebody might be his son.
The driver finished speaking to the sheriffs, then hooked the handset back on the dash.
“They say they’ll do it, but you better be right.”
“I’m right,” Monks said. “I wish to hell I wasn’t.”
Unexpectedly, the driver said, “You look like you could st
and to warm up. Come on, hop in.”
Monks walked around to the truck’s other side and swung himself up onto the running board, then into the cab. It was more like a den than a vehicle. The passenger seat was torn out, replaced by a crate of worn mechanic’s tools. The driver handed him a greasy brown duck jacket to put on top, and Monks squatted on that, finding a place for his feet amidst a pile of ropes, come-alongs, saw chains, rigging shackles, a battered metal Thermos, and a plastic lunch cooler. The smell wrapped him like a blanket, a combination of diesel fuel, solvent, tobacco, and, most of all, man.
“Chew?” the driver said, offering a foil packet of Red Man.
Monks shook his head. “Thanks for stopping. Sorry to trouble you.”
“Hell, I’m glad to be in on this. Them people up there-they kept to themselves and never caused any problems, but everybody had a bad feeling about them. They hunted you?”
“I’ve just been in a gunfight with them. I shot a man in the ankle.”
The driver’s face turned cautious again, or maybe skeptical. “Where’s your gun?”
“I’ll get it,” Monks said wearily. He climbed out of the truck and walked to where he had stashed the rifle. He walked back, holding it high over his head with both hands, in a clear position of surrender. Still, when he got close to the truck, he saw that the driver was holding a pistol, barrel braced on the window ledge-not exactly aimed at him, but ready. It was a large-caliber revolver, a.357 or.44 Magnum.
“Go ahead, take it,” Monks said, handing the rifle butt first up to the window. The driver gripped it and pulled it into the cab. It might have strengthened his belief in Monks’s story, or convinced him that Monks was not only crazy but dangerous. The pistol disappeared from sight, but Monks was sure it was still close at hand. The driver did not invite him back inside.
Monks watched for the helicopter that, finally, he knew was coming. Within ten minutes, he could feel its distant vibrations, quickly rising into a deep staccato drumbeat. It sped across the gray gap of open sky like a faraway hawk yawing with the wind, heading up into the mountains that Monks had fled.
The radio’s speaker squawked. The driver picked up his handset again.
“The hell-after all that rain?” Monks heard him say, his voice loud with disbelief. He swiveled in his seat to stare down at Monks.
“They’re saying that camp’s on fire,” the driver said.
23
“Dr. Monks? Time to wake up.”
The voice dimly penetrated Monks’s veil of sleep. He tried to open his eyes, but they were crusted shut. He knuckled at them until he managed to pry the lids apart, and sat up.
His immediate take was that he was in a nightmare conjured from some medieval vision of hell. The sky around him was dark, but beneath it a field of glowing embers stretched into the distance, flaring into flames and spouting small volcanoes of sparks. Misshapen, humpbacked figures prowled the outskirts, expelling hissing bursts of liquid onto the fires.
Then Monks remembered, groggily, that he was in the backseat of a Forest Service firefighters’ van, looking at what was left of Freeboot’s compound-the place known locally as the Harbine camp. The humanoids were a hastily mustered hotshot crew, not used to being called out this time of year, dressed in protective gear and spraying flame retardant. Two water trucks with fire hoses stood by.
The next thing that came into his mind was good news that he had learned from the sheriffs: Mandrake had been stabilized at the hospital in Willits, and he would soon be moved to a larger facility that specialized in juvenile diabetes. He had, in fact, contracted a viral infection that had weakened him severely and might have turned to pneumonia. But indications were good that he was going to recover.
The only thing that they would tell him about Marguerite was that she also had been picked up and was being questioned.
“It’s getting toward dawn,” his awakener said, standing in the van’s open door. “We’ll be wanting you to walk us through it as soon as it’s light.”
Monks recognized him as a walrus-mustached Mendocino County sheriff lieutenant named Agar who had been in charge of the several-hour grilling that Monks had gotten yesterday evening. The deputies hadn’t believed his story at first, and there had been no sightings of Freeboot or his followers in spite of roadblocks. It had even been hinted that Monks might have started the fire. But after he pulled up his pants legs to show them his savaged shins, they had started to come around.
He had told them that his son was with the group, that he feared that Freeboot would take revenge on Glenn, and he had passed up the offer of a warm bed to drive up here with them last night, hoping and dreading that there might be some sign of Glenn. But the fire was still a football-field-sized inferno that could blister skin from twenty yards away. Monks had watched it helplessly for a while, then borrowed a sleeping bag and crawled into the van. He was aware that crashing after extended meth use tended to be immediate and deep, and sleep had slammed down on him like a collapsing brick building.
“So I’m Dr. Monks now?” he said to Agar. “You sure?” His identity was another thing that the hard-faced deputies had been skeptical about.
Agar smiled. “Pretty sure. We’ve checked around, and we haven’t found anybody else pretending to be you, at least not yet.”
“Can’t imagine why anybody’d want to be,” Monks muttered.
“What’s that, sir?”
“Nothing. There any coffee around?”
“Right over there at the roach coach.”
Monks climbed stiffly out of the van. He saw that TV news crews had arrived during the night, and had set up cameras and equipment behind a yellow tape that the deputies had strung up, a safe distance from the fire.
“They’re foaming at the mouth to get hold of you,” Agar said. He watched Monks, gauging his response. Like most older cops that Monks had dealt with, Agar was on the beefy side, polite, and professionally bland-a characteristic that sometimes disguised shrewdness, and sometimes not. Agar was one of the shrewd ones.
“I’m not making any public statements until I talk to my lawyer.” Monks didn’t know if that made any sense, but it seemed to work for other people, at least on television.
Agar nodded approval. “We’ll keep them away.”
Monks followed the deputy to the “roach coach,” a catering truck set up for the firefighters. Its open side panels displayed urns of coffee and hot water, trays of sweetrolls and doughnuts, and a steam table with scrambled eggs, bacon, and sausage. His belly reminded him that he had hardly eaten in the last couple of days. He decided that he’d better fuel up while he had the chance. He filled a styrofoam cup with black coffee-predictably weak, but hot. The powdered eggs and greasy bacon tasted pretty damned good.
He stood off to the side, eating and watching the pageant around him, while the sky slowly lightened. The firefighters were starting to sift the ashes now, wading around in the areas that had cooled enough, searching debris and scattering embers with rakes. Several leather-jacketed deputies paced the perimeter or talked on radios.
He had overheard enough last night to know that the fire had exploded so suddenly and burned so hot, there was no doubt that accelerant had been used-a lot of it. Probably the log buildings had been soaked with gasoline, then lit from a distance by electronic detonators. It had been done fast and efficiently-as if according to a preexisting plan.
Then Freeboot and his people had slipped away. A search was slated to start at first light, in case they were still in the woods. Monks doubted it.
He scanned the field, trying to identify from the smoldering remains which buildings had stood where. The lodge was easy to recognize because of its large rock foundation. He oriented himself by it and located other sites-Glenn’s cabin, the washhouse, several other cabins and sheds reduced to smoking heaps of debris. Toward the field’s far end, the roof had caved in on a barn that had stayed closed while he had been there. Now he saw that it housed the smoke-blackened remains of a D-6
Cat and other heavy equipment.
“They had themselves quite an operation here,” Agar said, coming to stand beside him. “I’ve got a feeling we’re going to find some surprises.”
Monks nodded distractedly. His gaze kept returning to the firefighters, prodding and dragging the ashes with their rakes-
Probing, first and foremost, for bodies.
More vehicles were arriving, headlights piercing the early-morning gray, bringing more deputies and volunteers for the search through the woods. Some of the pickup trucks had dirt bikes or ATVs in the beds or on trailers. Most parked up the road, discharging men in hunting gear, carrying rifles.
But one four-wheel-drive sheriff’s SUV drove all the way into the camp. When the two people in the backseat got out, Monks noticed that they were women-then, that one of them was Marguerite.
Multilayered emotions bristled in him: happiness at seeing her safe, gratitude for her help, anger that she had gotten him into this mess in the first place-and mystification at why she had left him to stand by the roadside.
“That’s the young woman who helped me escape,” he said to Agar.
The deputy nodded. “Her story checks out pretty good with yours.”
“Why’s she up here?”
“Same reason as you. We want her to show us around, tell us everything she knows.”
“Okay if I have a word with her?”
“I don’t see why not. Let me make sure.” Agar walked over to the deputies who had brought the women and spoke briefly with them. Then he turned and beckoned Monks to come on over.
Marguerite watched him approach, her hands shoved deep into her coat pockets and her face emotionless-no happiness, no remorse. Monks could have been a mailman, coming to deliver a flyer about a tire sale. Her emotional shock had to be huge, with the trauma of all that had happened-and the shattering of her bond of loyalty, passion, and something mysteriously deeper still, to Freeboot.
