Neil McMahon - Revolution No.9

“Sometimes guilt makes things sweeter,” he said. “Any mick can tell you that.”

It was the strangest apartment building that Monks had ever been in, an old brick tenement hung with laundry, but the front walls were missing, so he could see right into the rooms. He was talking with a pixie-ish young woman, standing where the doorway would have been. She was pretty, her skin very pale, her hair orange.

That will be fine, then, she said earnestly. Monks agreed, but her features started changing, becoming bearded and disheveled, and she was speaking angry, accusing words. Disturbed, Monks drifted on, through a vaginal labyrinth of deep purples and reds.

Now there was something behind him, following, that he didn’t like at all. A name was coming into his head, with an “F” sound. Federico. Francesco. Freefreefree-

He ran, but the world around him had thickened into an endless swamp. His legs were like chunks of lead, his steps agonizing. He clawed at the decayed cypress knees that thrust up around him, pulling himself along, but it was way too late, because whatever had been following was not really behind him at all, it was already in him-

Monks said, “Haaah,” and struggled to sit up. His eyes were open. He was in Sara’s bed, with her sleeping beside him. He put his hand on her flank. Her breathing was undisturbed. Glad that he hadn’t awakened her, he settled back again and closed his eyes.

But a page from Pilgrim’s Progress, its Gothic etchings forever seared into his childhood memory, opened in his mind.

…he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him; his name is Apol-lyon.

Monks got up quietly and carried his clothes to the living room to dress. There was no chance of getting back to sleep.

The green LED readout on the microwave read 3:13. He opened the liquor cabinet and looked at the vodka bottle. But he knew that if he started, he wouldn’t stop, and come dawn, he would be wide-awake drunk. He started heating water for coffee instead.

His own dream had fit a pattern that was common for him-images that had recently been in his mind, blended with elements of absurdity, and ending in a helpless attempt to escape. The young woman’s face, melting into an ugly blur that recalled the homeless man on TV. The comforting birthlike passage giving way to a world that was harsh and dangerous. Federico and Francesco, Italian names stemming from his earlier talk with Sara, his mind groping for the “F” that it linked to the threat.

Freeboot.

In the aftermath of the fire, law-enforcement authorities had quickly identified Freeboot. His real name was James Reese. He had grown up semiferal in the northern California backwoods, part of a loose clan of dope growers and outlaws. As he had claimed, he’d spent a lot of his later life in prison. It also seemed true that he had experienced some kind of conversion-not religious, but intellectual and political-that had turned him from a run-of-the-mill loser into a serious figure who won the respect of other inmates. He had cleaned up his act, even getting his prison tattoos filled in to symbolize his turnaround. With his last sentence in Folsom served without incident, he faded off the radar of the criminal-justice system.

But there was another factor in the equation-a psychologist with the all-American name of Mary Jane Wilson, and an unsavory past of her own. Twice, as a high school counselor-once in her home state of Ohio, and later in Missouri -she had been dismissed for seducing teenage boys.

Hard-pressed to find work, Mary Jane had ended up as a counselor in the California prison system. She had her own ax to grind against authorities now, and, like many of the convicts, she felt at heart that she had been perfectly within her rights to do what she had done, that it was the law that had wronged her.

One of her clients at Folsom was James Reese. It was during that time period that he had his “epiphany.” The two of them bonded, him taking the name Freeboot, and she Shrinkwrap. The details of what followed were unclear, but an overall picture emerged from what solid information was available, what Marguerite had contributed, and guesswork.

About four years ago, Shrinkwrap had moved to the North Coast, where she falsified her record, deleting the dismissals, and set up shop. Here in the heart of pot-growing country there were plenty of troubled kids. She quickly became popular with them, although this time there were no reported incidents of sexual misconduct. If she was at it again, she kept it well hidden. She bought an isolated rundown farm near Lake Pillsbury and turned it into an informal retreat for her young clientele. Using intuition and her skills as a psychologist, she determined their susceptibility.

When Freeboot got out of jail and joined her, he brought with him a rhetoric-charged agenda and a training program cobbled together from his superficial reading of history, folklore, and paramilitary creeds. The chosen candidates were carefully brought up through levels, their loyalty constantly tested, their personalities systematically broken down and rebuilt along fanatical lines, with the reward of belonging to a secret, super-powerful elite. Drug use was encouraged, especially of methamphetamine-which, Monks had learned, had been given to kamikaze pilots and Nazi soldiers to make them more alert and aggressive, enabling them to function up to ten days without sleep. A popular form of manufacturing the drug was even known as “the Nazi method.”

Freeboot also acquired Motherlode, who had the extra qualification of being a wealthy heiress. Besides a hefty trust fund and other investments, she happened to own the property up in the wilderness north of Lake Pillsbury. He married her and set up a second camp there-the place where Monks had been held.

Shrinkwrap’s farm served as both a cover operation and a base, providing physical needs and a closer link to civilization. The mountain camp was for the elite-the training place for the few who were selected to be maquis and brides. Everything was kept scrupulously legal on the surface-taxes paid, no obvious drug use or welfare fraud, or any other reason for authorities to come around. As the logging truck driver had told Monks, people in the area knew that the group was there and didn’t much like it, but everybody left everybody else alone.

Days of careful searching through the camp’s wreckage had revealed little. The fire had destroyed almost everything. Computers found in an underground bunker had been stripped of their hard drives, and explosives had turned what was left into a chaos of junk. Police had done their best to track down the fugitives, but the fugitives had vanished. The identities of some were traced, but with no results-they were drifters, runaways, throwaways. Others, like Taxman, remained wild cards, their legal names still unknown.

It seemed that Freeboot’s boastful intentions about righting social injustices and changing history had gone up with the smoke. Now he was a fallen idol, an ex-con on the run, wanted for a host of crimes that would put him back in prison for life. But even here, he had provided for himself with alarming foresight. He had acquired power of attorney over Motherlode’s inheritance, dismissing the outraged trustees that her parents had put in charge. Investigators had discovered that roughly twelve million dollars of that money then had been siphoned off, apparently into numbered overseas bank accounts.

Now Motherlode was dead and Freeboot was rich.

Much as Monks had tried to write him off, he had not been able to. Freeboot’s level of organization, together with his personal power, were too disturbing. Now he seemed to be turning up in Monks’s imagination-getting into his head, as Freeboot’s devotees claimed he could. All of Monks’s scientific training scorned any such notion. But he recalled uneasily two separate instances when he could almost have sworn that people had made psychic contact with him. Both of them had been trying to kill him at the time.