Zodiac

28

THIS DOLMACHER GUY had no sense of personal responsibility. We needed him, damn it. Never thought I'd say that about Dolmacher, but we did. He'd invented the fucking bugs, nursed them, grown them, knew all about their life cycles, what they needed in the way of food and temperature and pH. If we made him settle down, if we grilled him, we could find out a simple way to massacre those bacteria. But no. He had to go up to the land of orange hats to seek revenge on Fleshy. And probably get killed in the process.

We headed north. It was 1:00 A.M. on a Friday night. Within a couple of hours we'd found Survival Game headquarters-a fairly new log cabin built up against some private forest. As we were pulling around into a parking space, our headlights swept through the cockpits of several parked cars, mostly beaters from the Seventies, and we caught brief silhouettes of men in baseball caps sitting up to look at us. Jim and I unrolled some sleeping bags on the ground, quietly, and went to sleep. Boone drove out to scavenge some newspapers and see if he could figure out Pleshy's schedule for the next couple of days.

I didn't sleep at all. Jim pretended for half an hour, then went over to a payphone on the wall of the cabin and made a call to Anna.

"How's she doing?" I asked when he got back.

"I didn't think you were asleep," he said.

"Nah. Boone's sleeping bag smells like Ben-Gay and hydrogen sulfide. So I'm lying here trying to imagine what kind of action he went out on where he got real sore muscles and made contact with that type of gas. And I'm waiting for the next bulletin from my colon."..

"She's fine," he said. "Went into Rochester today looking for wallpaper."

"Redoing your house?"

"Bit by bit, you know."

"That leads me to ask why you're here and not there."

"Beats me. This is a white man's screw up if ever there was one. But you helped me once and now I gotta help you."

"I release you from the obligation."

"You don't have anything to do with it. It's an internal thing, within me, you know. I have to stay with this a while longer or I won't have any self-respect. Besides, shit, it's kind of fun."

Boone got back a little before dawn, totally wired. He had hit every cafe in a twenty-mile radius, drunk a large coffee, and scooped up loose newspapers off the counter.

"He's at the Lumbermen's Festival," Boone said, "north of here, less than an hour."

"Staying there tonight?"

"Who the fuck knows, they don't put that kind of stuff in the newspaper."

"Going to be there all day?"

"Morning. Then to Nashua later. Looking at high-tech firms. With your pal Laughlin."

"How fitting." I was stirring through his damn newspapers with both arms. "You asshole, didn't you bring the comics?"

Boone was all hot to go straight to the Lumberman's Festival, but Jim persuaded him that we couldn't do much when it was still dark. I thought it was interesting that these Survival Game players went to the trouble to drive up here the night before and sleep in the parking lot-they must hit the trail at dawn.

Sure enough, a huge four-wheel-drive pickup pulled into the one RESERVED space at about 5:00 A.M. It was tall and black and equipped with everything you needed to drive through a blizzard or a nuclear war. A guy got out: not the stringy, hollow-eyed Vietnam vet I'd expected but a big solid older guy, more of the Korean generation. I heard people coming alive in the cars all around us.

Jim and I caught up with him while he was undoing the three deadbolts on the front door. "Morning," he said, ignoring me and taking a lot of interest in Jim. I knew he'd do that. That's why I'd persuaded Jim to get out of his warm sleeping bag and come up here with me.

"Morning," we said, and I added, "you guys get an early start up here."

He pressed his lips together and beamed. There are certain people who are just genetically made to get up at four in the morning and wake everyone else up. They usually become scoutmasters or camp counselors. "Interested in the Survival Game?"

"I've got this friend named Dolmacher who's told me all about it," I said.

"Dolmacher! Hoo-ee! That guy is a demon! Surprised I didn't see his car out there." He led us into the cabin, turned on the lights, and fired up a kerosene space heater. Then he hit the switch on his coffee maker. I caught Jim looking at me wryly. This was the kind of guy who put the coffee grounds and water in his Mr. Coffee the night before so all he had to do was switch it on in the morning. A natural leader.

"Is Dolmacher pretty good at this?" Jim said.

The guy laughed. "Listen, sir, if we gave out black belts at this game, he'd be, I don't know, fifth or sixth dan. He's got me completely bamboozled." The guy sized Jim up and nodded at him. "Course, you might have better luck."

"Yeah," Jim said, "my fifteen years as a washing machine repairman have really honed my instincts."

The guy laughed heartily, taking it as a friendly joke. "You ever done this kind of thing before?"

"Just bow hunting," Jim said. Which was news to me. I thought he'd killed all that venison with his big fancy rifle.

"Well, that's real similar, in a lot of ways. You have to get close, because you're using a short-range weapon. And that means you have to be smart. Like Dolmacher."

I suppressed a groan. In this company, Dolmacher was probably considered an Einstein.

"I thought you used guns," Jim said.

"Handguns. And they're all CO2-powered. So the effective range is pretty short. Here."

He unlocked a gun cabinet full of largish pistols. He showed us where the CO2 cartridge went in, and then showed us the ammunition: a squishy rubber ball, marble-sized, full of red paint.

"This thing hits you and ploosh! You're marked. See, totally nonviolent. It's a game of strategy. That's why Dolmacher's so good at it. He's a master strategist."

We told the guy that we'd get back to him. When we got back to the parking lot, Boone was standing in a semicircle of awed survivalists, explaining how to defeat a Doberman Pinscher in single combat without hurting it.

"Nice to see you're getting back to your old self," I told him, when we finally dragged him back into the truck.

"Those guys are troglodytes," he said. "Their solution to everything is a high-powered rifle."

"Maybe we should start an institute on nonviolent terrorism."

"Catchy. But if it's not violent, there's no terror involved."

"Boone, you sound like those guys. There's more to life than firepower. I think it's possible to create some terror just by confronting people with their own sins."

"What's your problem, you grow up Catholic or something? Nobody gives a shit about their sins anymore. You think those corporate execs worry about sin?"

"Well, they've poisoned people, they've broken the law, and when I show them up in the media, they get real bothered by it."

"That's just because it's bad for business. They don't really feel guilty."

By now Jim had us out on the highway. He pointed the silver Indian's face northwards and depressed the accelerator.

"How about Fleshy?" Boone said. "You think he feels guilty? You think he's scared? Shit no."

"They're still human beings, Boone. I'll bet he's scared shitless. He created a disaster."

"Yeah, he's showing all the symptoms of a man paralyzed with fear," Boone said, consulting one of his newspapers. "Let's see, ten o'clock, ax-throwing competition. Ten-thirty, grand marshal of log-rolling contest. He's running sacred all right."

"What do you expect him to do, run to Boston and hide? Look Boone, the guy is slick. He's got his gnomes working on the problem. Like Laughlin. Shit, I wonder what that bastard Laughlin's up to. Pleshy's job is to go around looking brave. But if someone confronted him, right in front of the TV cameras..."

Boone and I locked eyes for about a quarter of a mile, until Jim got nervous and started looking over at us. "You guys are nuts," he said, "you'll get popped. Or shot."

"But at the very least he'd break a sweat," I said.

"I'll buy that," Boone said.

"And we could publicize the whole thing." I was remembering my last action in New Hampshire-at the Seabrook nuclear site, years ago. We all got arrested, never made it onto the site. Some of us even got the crap beat out of us. But we got it on the news. And the reactor was still sitting there, uncompleted, a decade later.

"You'd have to get real close," Jim said. "Secret Service, you know."

"They'll be totally loose," Boone said. "What do they have to worry about? A dwarf like Fleshy-nobody even remembers the guy's name-early in the campaign, at an ax-throwing contest in New fuckin' Hampshire. Shit, if I was going to assassinate him, this is when I'd do it."

We found Dolmacher's car easily enough. The Lumbermen's Festival was staged in one of the many postage-stamp state parks scattered around New Hampshire, and there just weren't that many ways to get into it. We knew he wasn't go-

ing to park his car conspicuously, or illegally. He was going to park it like a proper Beantown leaf-peeper and then he was going to fade into the woods. And that was exactly what he'd done. We found it at a roadside camping/picnicking area, near the head of a nature-appreciation trail.

"Very clever," Jim said. "No one would expect him there."

I looked in the windows but didn't see much. One pharmaceuticals bottle, half-hidden under the seat. No ammo belts or open tubes of camouflage paint. Dolmacher was taking a remarkably buttoned-down approach to this totally insane mission.

Maybe the bugs could affect your brain. The media had been speculating all week that my contact with toxic wastes had fried my cerebral cortex, turned me into a drooling terrorist. I felt pretty calm, but Dolmacher had gotten a much worse dose, and was less stable to begin with. He hadn't turned into a raving maniac. He was acting more like the psychotics you read about in the newspapers: calm, methodical, invisible.

Jim was sitting in the truck, messing around with something, and Boone was watching intently. I went over, stood on the running board, and looked. Jim had pulled one of his homemade bows out from behind the seat.

"This is the Nez Perce model," he explained. "See, the limbs are strengthened with a membrane that comes from the inside of a ram's horn. They used bighorn sheep, but I get by using domesticateds."

"What the fuck are you going to do with that, Jim?"

"What the fuck are you going to do when you catch Dolmacher, S.T.? Remember? Your gun's on the bottom of that lake."

"Wasn't planning on shooting him anyway."

"You're a real prize, you know that? What do you think we're doing here? It's my understanding that we're going after a psycho with a gun."

"Only because we have to have his knowledge. We won't have that if we fill him full of arrows."

"You underestimate me, S.T" Jim pulled a bundle of arrows out from behind the seat. The shafts were straight and smooth, feathers at the back as usual, but without heads.

"Fishing arrows," Boone said.

Jim nodded and held one up for me. One short barb stuck backwards from the point, and a short perpendicular piece was lashed to the shaft about three inches behind that.

"This keeps it from going all the way through the fish, the barb keeps it from pulling out. Now, a game arrow, with the big head, that kills by severing a lot of blood vessels. The animal bleeds to death. But this will just stick into a big animal and annoy him."

I guess I still looked skeptical.

"Look, the guy said Dolmacher has a black belt in this game. If you think he's going to let us sneak up close enough to pluck the gun out of his hand, you're nuts."

"Okay. But if the Secret Service comes after us, you have to toss all that crap into the bushes."

"Obviously. Hell, this isn't for assassinations anyhow. It's the equivalent of a CO2 gun with paint pellets."