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.

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.”