Revolution No. 9 by Neil McMahon

shotgun a few inches and pressed the muzzle against Monks’s knee.
    â€œThere’s no need for that,” Monks said. “I know I’m outgunned.”
    â€œCoil says you got a reputation for causing trouble. Don’t try it with me.”
    â€œOkay,” Monks said. “I won’t try it with you.”

4
    F reeboot ran like a wildman, pounding barefoot over the camp’s familiar paths, then out into the forest and onto the deer trails that he knew just as well. He was hot with rage.
    Monks had made a fool of him. He had lost it, in front of everyone.
    He just couldn’t get past the fear that drinking that piss would infect him with the weakness it carried.
    After half a mile the trail took a sudden rise up a steep rocky crag. Freeboot drove himself to the top, leaping from foothold to foothold like a mountain goat, his hard, horny feet gripping the rocks surely and silently. Finally he slowed to a walk, circling the crag’s summit with hands on hips. He was breathing hard, but not winded. His legs ached with the strain, but he was ready for more.
    He took the Copenhagen can from his shirt pocket and dipped his knifepoint into the powdered crank. He blasted three sharp hits into each nostril, a dose that would have lefta normal man crawling around on the ground, screaming. As the drug filled him, he stood and opened his arms wide to the night sky, feeling like he could leap up into it and fly to the fucking moon. Most nights, he spent several hours out here in the woods, prowling his turf. In clear weather he could see almost to the Pacific, across the swaying treetops of the redwood forest that rose and fell down the mountain slopes like the waves of a deep green sea. The nearest paved road was fifteen miles away, the first tiny town was three miles farther, and tonight, even the few dim lights of the camp were lost in the blanketing mist.
    Everything that he was going to do—that only he could do—was lying there at his feet, waiting.
    All right. He was feeling better now. Monks had won that round. You had to respect the motherfucker.
    But it was just starting.
    Freeboot shook an unfiltered Camel cigarette from a pack and lit it. An occasional smoke would not hurt a man if he flushed his lungs rigorously with clean air every day.
    He took a different path back down the crag and toward camp, moving with a stride that was almost a lope, but stealthy enough not to alarm the herd of deer that bedded down nearby.
    He paused at one of the hidden seismic geophones that were buried around the camp’s perimeter. His favorite night game was to trip a sensor to alert a sentry, lure him into a snare, then disarm him and leave him tied to a tree for the others to find. The way he was feeling tonight, he would have hung the man upside down and thrashed him with a fir branch.
    But there was business to take care of. Freeboot loped on to the bunker, a shaft cut into the rocky earth by coolie labor back in gold-rush days when this place had been a mining camp. The entrance was hidden by a shed with a false floor.He bolted shut the shed door from the inside, yanked up the wooden hatch, and dropped down the ladder into the hollowed-out antechamber. The bunker was secure and soundproof, outfitted for comfort, with chairs, cots, and a propane heater that vented through a hidden flue. There were battery-operated electric lights and laptop computers, with a gas-powered generator to recharge them. The catacombs of mining tunnels that branched out held stocks of food and water, along with weapons and other covert equipment.
    Bunker-wise, Hitler had nothing on Freeboot.
    Taxman and Shrinkwrap were already inside, waiting. Freeboot walked directly to an IBM ThinkPad and slotted in a CD that had been delivered earlier that evening. The screen changed as the CD’s contents came up.
    â€œWe’ve got some issues here, Freeboot,” Shrinkwrap said. She was trying to sound cool, but her mouth