Revolution No. 9 (10 page)

“Hey, man, you don't own this place, okay?” she said. “As a matter of fact,
I
do.”

“We're talking about your son.”

She glanced over at the bed, where Mandrake might or might not have been awake and listening. Then she shoved the syringe into Monks's hand and pushed petulantly through the hanging blanket into the main room.

“Why don't you
stay
here?” Monks said, following her. “Play with him, read to him.”

“I can't right now.”

“Are you HIV positive?” Monks demanded.

She spun to face him, as if she had been shot.

“
No
,” she spat out. She hurried on outside without looking back.

Mandrake hadn't moved, but his eyes were open. Monks sat down beside him on the bed and started reading aloud from
The Runaway Bunny
.

 

Shrinkwrap walked toward the lodge with a small flashlight in her hand, flicking it on and off in the three-two-three code the group used to identify themselves. Dusk had turned to full night, the moon a faint smudge behind the thick clouds rolling in from the Pacific. Hammerhead was in that darkness somewhere, standing guard, watching her approach. She shone the light on her own face.

“It's me, HH,” she said. “We need to talk.”

His shape separated from the shadows beside the lodge, rifle in hand, barrel pointed down. Hammerhead trusted her absolutely, and she understood him far better than he understood himself. She had found him, like the others—troubled young men whose aimless aggressiveness would almost certainly have led them to prison. She counseled them as a psychologist, bullied them like a drill sergeant, and nurtured them like a mother. Once that intimacy was established, she took them to bed, deepening the bond by deliciously violating the taboo. Then she weaned them to the care of Freeboot and Taxman, who would channel their wild energy into purpose.

Although once in a while one would come along, with just the right combination of boyishness and insolence, and she would keep him for as long as it was convenient. Right now, that one was Monks's son.

“You sure we're alone?” she asked Hammerhead.

He nodded. Still, she spoke in a conspiratorial whisper.

“Freeboot sent me to tell you there's going to be a scalp hunt tonight. And a chance for you to make
maquis
.” She smiled. “So if you bring home the hair of a certain person, you'll be initiated. I think you know who I mean.”

His reaction surprised her. She had expected a show of fierce elation. Making
maquis
would mean that he would finally have what he wanted most—Marguerite. And a chance to get even with Captain America in the process.

But he only licked his lips anxiously. His big face looked pale, and his eyes were troubled, even frightened. Hammerhead followed orders well but didn't think fast, and when he was faced with a decision, he tended to get nervous. But she had never seen him scared before.

She stepped closer and touched his face, concerned. “Hey, sweetie. What's going on with you?”

“Nothing,” he mumbled.

“Come on, you can tell me. You know I'll stay cool.”

Hammerhead looked around unhappily, as if reassuring himself that no one else was nearby.

“He said I got this thing in my eye. A tic.” His finger rose and touched his face.

“Who said?”

“Him.” Hammerhead jerked his head toward the lodge. “Coil's old man.”

“A tic?”

“Yeah. You know.” He fluttered his eyelid clumsily.

“Well, what about it?”

Hammerhead swallowed hard. “It means I'm gonna die.”

Shrinkwrap stared at him, hands coming to rest on her hips. “He told you
what
?”

M
onks had discovered, twenty-some years earlier, that he made a pretty good mattress whale—stretched out on a bed, rising and falling in undulating motions, with much thrashing and loud blubbering sounds. The clowning had delighted his own kids, and now, for the first time, Mandrake was sitting up and giggling.

“Okay, hop on my back,” Monks said. “We're going to dive down really deep and try to find a treasure. But the only thing I'm worried about is, there might be a mermaid guarding it. You know what those are?”

Wide-eyed, Mandrake shook his head.

“They're very pretty ladies who are half fish,” Monks said solemnly. “And they're usually really nice, but if they catch somebody coming after their treasure…”

Mandrake started to look worried. Monks feared that he had pushed too far. He was doing his best to maintain a hu
morous face, but he knew that as he had gotten older his smile had taken on a crocodilian look.

“They'll tickle us—like
this
,” he declared, and gently scrabbled his fingertips along the little boy's rib cage.

Mandrake chortled gleefully, grabbing at his hands.

“So you have to tell me if you see a mermaid, okay?” Monks said. “We can get away, but we'll have to go really fast.”

“Okay,” Mandrake agreed, in a very small voice.

It was the first time that he had spoken to Monks.

Three or four minutes later, whale and rider took a breather. It had been a harrowing journey. A treasure had been sighted, but just before they could seize it—there was a mermaid! They'd escaped, but not without a desperate battle, both of them being tickled to the limits of endurance.

“We'll go again, real soon,” Monks promised the panting little boy. “Now you have to drink some water.” Getting Mandrake active and engaged was good; tiring him out was not.

Monks got up to get the water pitcher. The blanket hanging in the doorway moved aside. Monks stared, in unpleasant shock, at the etched, intense face of Taxman. There was no telling how long he had been standing there behind the blanket.

“Freeboot wants you,” Taxman said.

“Mandrake needs attention.”

“It won't take long.”

Monks hesitated. He had already decided that he could check the boy's blood sugar level every two hours now—it had remained stable, and Mandrake clearly was feeling better.

“Let me just get him to drink first,” Monks said.

Taxman nodded and stepped back, letting the blanket fall into place again.

Monks gave Mandrake the water cup. “Think you can do
this yourself now, buddy?” he said. Mandrake took it in both hands and drank thirstily.

“Good boy,” Monks said. “I'll be right back. We're going to eat some more soup and rest up. Then we'll go get that treasure.”

 

Outside, the night sky was thick with impending rain. The erratic breeze had turned cold, and the treetops waved restlessly. When they reached the camp's perimeter, Monks realized that they weren't headed toward one of the buildings. Instead, they kept walking on a trail into the forest. Monks blundered along at first, barely able to see the path beneath his feet. Except for the wind and the rustling trees, the woods were silent, without the night birds and creatures that he was used to at his home's lower, warmer altitude. Taxman flanked him silently. Unlike the other guards, Taxman did not carry a gun. But Monks had no doubt that he was very quick with his knife.

By the time they'd gone a quarter of a mile, his eyes had adjusted. Then, another few hundred yards ahead, he saw what looked like flames. They vanished and appeared again, flickering like a will-o'-the-wisp, hidden and revealed by the trees as he wound his way through them. When he got a good look, he realized that he was seeing a bonfire in a clearing at the base of a rocky cliff. There were dark human shapes gathered around it, some crouching and some standing.

His sudden overwhelming sense was of being a captive, brought to a barbaric camp for torture and death at the hands of his enemies. Fear verging on panic clogged his throat. He stopped and turned to face Taxman, tensing to fight or run.

Taxman was gone.

Monks stood still, breathing deeply. He didn't think the figures around the fire had spotted him yet. He could slip
away into the woods, move stealthily until he was out of earshot, then take off in all-out flight.

But his rational mind started to regain the upper hand. He would almost certainly be caught within minutes. This might even be a test—Freeboot pushing to see how far he could be trusted—and if he failed it, he'd end up back in chains. There didn't seem to be any reason that Freeboot would want him harmed.

Unless he had decided that Monks was no longer useful, or that Monks had offended his giant ego beyond forgiving. Then this might be Freeboot's idea of a joke—having Monks walk freely to his own execution.

He forced himself to turn back toward the fire and continue.

The men in the clearing watched him as he came in, but no one spoke. They were all dressed as if for nighttime military operations, in black fatigues and combat boots, with paint-darkened faces and web belts bristling with equipment. All wore large-caliber semiautomatic pistols in holsters and carried assault rifles. Monks counted nine men, including the thick shape of Hammerhead near the fire, standing stiffly like a Marine on guard, and farther away, the handsome profile of Captain America. He didn't think that he had seen any of the others before. Glenn wasn't there, nor was Freeboot.

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 rank. 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.”