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.”

The men came forward one at a time, laying their rifles and pistols at Freeboot’s feet. Some looked self-assured, others apprehensive.

“You’ll hear a gunshot in ten minutes,” Freeboot said. “That’s when it starts. You come back with somebody else’s hair or without your own. That’s when it ends.”

He snapped his fingers. The men took off in crouching runs, scattering in different directions.

Abruptly, one of the figures veered like a football running back sidestepping a blocker, and lunged straight at Monks. He barely had time to raise his forearms, covering his torso like a boxer, before Hammerhead’s shoulder slammed into him. It knocked him sprawling, skidding on his tailbone.

Hammerhead charged on, never even slowing down.

Monks struggled to his feet, trying to get his breath back. Freeboot was watching him. It was the first time he had seemed aware that Monks was there.

“You’re a noncombatant, Rasp,” Freeboot said matter-off-actly. “But I’d get on back to camp, if I was you. Somebody’s likely to make a mistake.”

Monks started back along the trail at a fast walk. He had only gone about ten yards when he heard a voice hiss from the trees:

“There are no noncombatants.”

He spun around, searching the darkness with his gaze. The words had come from only a few feet away. But the speaker was invisible.

He headed toward camp again, this time at a jog.

The voice could have been a man’s, high-pitched or disguised, but he was almost sure it was Shrinkwrap’s.

Monks had just gotten inside the lodge when he heard a faint, faraway gunshot-the signal for a group of cranked-up young militants armed with knives and Mace to start hunting each other’s hair.

He leaned back against the wall, resting. The urge to keep running had been with him all the way. But his fear of getting caught and arousing Freeboot’s wrath outweighed his fear of staying on.

One thing was clear by now-Freeboot’s brand of trust had teeth.

Then there was Hammerhead. Monks had become the target of his anger, for reasons that didn’t much matter. What did matter was that the thin membrane of safety that Monks had started to feel had been shredded by Hammerhead’s shoulder-especially as Freeboot had watched it happen, and not said a word.

“He said you were going to bring him more soup,” someone said quietly.

Monks jerked toward the voice. Marguerite was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He realized that the he referred to Mandrake. She must have gone in to check on him.

“I’m heating it up,” she said. “I could fix you something, too.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“It’ll have to be another sandwich. They cook down at another place and bring it up, but right now there’s not much.”

“Anything but venison,” Monks said.

She looked puzzled, but then drifted back into the kitchen. Monks followed her, again smelling marijuana. A saucepan of broth for Mandrake was heating on top of the wood cookstove. She gave the pan a stir, then went to the refrigerator, taking out cold cuts and bread. There was a big supply of those; apparently, sandwiches were a staple here.

“It seems like you do all the work around this place,” Monks said.

“I don’t mind. It’s better than doing nothing.”

“That’s a pretty name. Marguerite.”

She did not seem displeased. “It’s not my real one.”

Monks was surprised. It was the only name he’d heard here that seemed normal.

“What is?”

She glanced at him warily. “I can’t tell you.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. Why Marguerite, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“There’s this old story, Faust? He sells his soul to the devil?”

Monks nodded encouragingly.

“Marguerite is, like, the woman who saves him at the end,” she said.

So-along with Freeboot’s vision of himself as part Spartacus and part Übermensch, there was a dash of Faust, who had dared to go beyond all limits.

“Is that how you see yourself, saving Freeboot?” Monks asked. “Faust made Marguerite put up with a lot of trouble along the way.”

“Hey, man, I didn’t pick it. Freeboot did.” This time her voice had an edge.

“Don’t get me wrong, I meant that as a compliment,” Monks said quickly. “In the story, Marguerite is very bighearted, very loyal.”

She ignored him, using a plastic knife to lather mayonnaise on a slice of white bread, then adding baloney and cheese. It was looking like lunch all over again.

But then she said, “He gives everybody a new name. It’s, like, getting rid of who you used to be and becoming a new person.”

“And all the names have a special meaning?”

“Kind of. He sees deep inside you, to who you really are.”

Monks made a quick mental tally of the names that he had heard. Some, like Hammerhead and Sidewinder, seemed to suggest that Freeboot hadn’t found much to work with in the way of deep character qualities. Coil, unsettling though Monks found it, did touch on Glenn’s intrinsic restlessness; and Shrinkwrap probably referred to her being a psychologist. Some of the others were more obscure.

“What about Captain America?” Monks said, watching to see if mentioning Marguerite’s lover seemed to strike a nerve.

She tossed her hair dismissively. “He’s good-looking, cool. There’s this old movie Freeboot likes, Easy Rider? It came from there.”

Monks called up a vague memory of the movie. The Peter Fonda character, that was it.