Neil McMahon - Revolution No.9

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.

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 stand 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.