The Sun was shining, and Mary Terror was in the woods.
She ran on cramping legs through the wilderness, the breath pluming from her mouth in the chilly air, her body giving up moisture into the gray sweatsuit she wore. It had been a long time since she had run, and her legs weren't used to the effort. It angered her that she'd let herself get so out of shape; it was a weakness of the mind, a failure of willpower. As she ran through the sun-dappled Georgia forest about three miles from her apartment, she held the Colt.38 in her right hand, her index finger curled around the trigger guard. Sweat was on her face, her lungs beginning to labor though she'd barely gone a third of a mile at an easy pace. The ravines and hillocks were rough on her knees, but she was in training and she gritted her teeth and took the pain like an old lover.
It was just before two o'clock on Sunday afternoon, four days after she'd found the message in the Rolling Stone. Her pickup truck was parked at the end of an old logging road; she knew these woods, and often came here to practice her shooting. It had come upon her to run, to work up a sweat and make the hinges of her lungs wheeze, because the road to the weeping lady lay ahead. She knew the dangers of that road, knew that she was vulnerable out on the open byways of the Mindfuck State, where pigs of every description cruised for a killing. To reach her destination, she would have to be tough and smart, and she'd lived too long as Ginger Coles in a redneck cocoon for the preparations to be easy. Her body wanted to rest, but she pushed herself onward. As she went up a hill she caught sight of the highway to Atlanta in the distance, the sunlight sparking off the glass and metal of speeding cars; then she was going down again, through a pine tree thicket where shadows carpeted the earth, the breath burning in her lungs and her face full of heat. Faster! she urged herself. Faster! Her legs remembered the thrill of speed at a high school track meet, when she'd strained past the other runners toward the tape. Faster! Faster! She ran along the bottom of a wooded ravine, pushing herself to go all out, and that was when her left foot hit a snag and she went down on her belly in the dead leaves and kudzu. The wind whooshed out of her and her chin scraped along the ground, and she lay there puffing and listening to a squirrel chatter angrily in a nearby tree.
'Shit,' Mary said. She sat up, rubbed her chin, found scraped skin but no blood. When she tried to stand, her legs didn't want to. She sat there for a moment, breathing hard, dark motes spinning before her eyes in the cold, slanting sunlight. Falls were part of the training, she knew. Falls were cosmic teachers. That's what Lord Jack used to say. When you knew how to fall, you truly knew how to stand. She lay on the ground, catching her breath and remembering the commando training. The Storm Front's headquarters had been hidden in woods like these, only you could smell the sea in the eastern winds. Lord Jack had been a hard taskmaster: sometimes he awakened them with whispers at four o'clock in the morning, other times with gunshots at midnight. Then he would run the soldiers through the obstacle course, keeping time with a stopwatch and shouting a melange of encouragement and threats. Mary recalled the wargames, when two teams hunted each other in the woods armed with pistols that fired paint pellets. Sometimes the hunt was one-against-one, and those were the trials she'd enjoyed the most; she had never been tagged in all the dozens of hunts Lord Jack had put her into. She had enjoyed turning back on her adversary, coming around in a silent, stalking circle, and delivering the blow that finished the game. No one had ever beaten her at the hunt. No one.
Mary forced herself up. The pain in her bones reminded her that she was no longer a young firebrand, but low coals burned longer. She began running again, with long, steady strides. Her thighs and calves were aching, but she closed her mind to the pain. Make friends with agony, Lord Jack had said. Embrace it, kiss it, stroke it. Love the pain, and you win the game. She ran with the pistol held at her side, and she saw a squirrel dart from the brush and scramble toward an oak tree to her right. She stopped, skidding in a flurry of leaves, slowing the squirrel down into strobelike motions with the force of her concentration. The squirrel was going up the treetrunk, now leaping for a higher branch.
Mary lifted the pistol in a two-handed grip, took aim, and squeezed the trigger.
The crack of the shot and the explosion of the squirrel's head were almost simultaneous. The body fell into the leaves, writhed for a few seconds, and lay still.
She ran on, the sweet tang of gunpowder in her nostrils and the pistol warm in her hand.
Her eyes searched the shadowed woods. Pig on the left! she thought, and she checked her progress and whirled in a crouch with her gun ready, aiming at a scraggly pine. She ran again, over a hillock and down. Pig on the right! She threw herself to the ground, raising dust, and as she slid on her stomach she took aim at another tree and fired a shot that clipped a top branch and sent a bluejay shrieking into the sky. Then up again – quick, quick! – and onward, her tennis shoes gouging the ground. Another squirrel, drowsing in the sun, came to life and fled across her path; she tracked it, heading toward a group of pines. It was a fast one, desperate with fear. She fired at it as it clambered up a treetrunk, missed by a few inches to the left, but hit the squirrel in the spine with the second bullet. She heard it squeak as she passed on, a signature of blood across the treebark.
Pig to the right! She crouched again, taking aim at an imaginary enemy. Off in the forest, crows called to each other. She smelled woodsmoke as she ran again, and she figured houses must be near. She entered a tangle of thicket, the sweat trickling down the back of her neck and dead leaves snagged in her hair. As she fought through the growth, battering it aside with her forearms, she thought of Jack urging her on with his stopwatch and whistle. He had written the message from the underground; of that she had no doubt. He was calling the Storm Fronters together again, after all these years. Calling for her, his true love. There had to be a purpose behind his summons. The Mindfuck State was still full of pigs, and all the Revolution had done was make them meaner. If the Storm Front could rise up again, with Lord Jack holding its red banner, she would be the happiest woman on earth. She had been born to fight the pigs, to grind them down under her boots and blow their shitty brains out. That was her life; that was reality. When she got back to Lord Jack and the Storm Front was on the move again, the pigs would tremble at the name of Mary Terror.
She burst through the foliage, her face raked by thorns. Pig to the left! she thought, and she dove for the ground. She hit the clayey dirt on her shoulder, rolled through weeds, and contorted her body to the left, lifting the pistol to take aim at –
A boy.
He was standing maybe fifteen yards away, in a splash of sunlight. He wore bluejeans with patched knees and a camouflage-print windbreaker, and on his head was a dark blue woolen cap. His eyes were large and round, and in his arms he held a small, boy-sized rifle.
Mary Terror lay where she was, the gun aimed in the boy's direction. Time stretched, breaking only when the boy opened his mouth.
'You okay, lady?'
'I fell,' she said, trying to assemble her wits.
'Yeah, I saw. You okay?'
Mary glanced around. Was the boy alone? No one else in sight. She said, 'Who you out here with?'
'Just me. My house is over that way.' He motioned with a turning of his head, but the boy's home was about a half-mile away, over a hill and out of sight.
Mary stood up. She saw the boy's eyes fix on the revolver in her hand. He was about nine or ten, she decided; his face was ruddy, the cheeks chill-burned. The rifle he held was a.22, and it had a small telescopic sight. 'I'm all right,' she told him. Again her gaze searched the woods. Birds sang, cars droned on the distant highway, and Mary Terror was alone with the boy. 'I tripped,' she said. 'Stupid, huh?'
'You 'bout scared the life outta me, comin' through there and all.'
'Sorry. Didn't mean to.' She lifted her head slightly and sniffed the woodsmoke. Maybe a fire in the hearth at the kid's house, she thought.
'What're you doin' out here? Kinda far from the road.' He kept his rifle pointed at the ground. The first thing his father had told him: never point a gun at a person unless you're gonna use it.
'Just hiking.' She saw him look at the pistol again. 'Target shooting, too.'
'I heard some shots. That was you, I reckon.'
'That was me.'
'I'm squirrel-huntin',' the boy said, and he offered a gap-toothed grin. 'I got me this here new rifle for my birthday. See?'
She had never run into anyone out here before. She didn't like this, didn't like it at all. A boy alone with a squirrel rifle. She didn't like it. 'How come no one's with you?' she asked.
'My daddy had to go in to work. He said if I was careful I could come on out by myself, but I wasn't to go too far from the house.'
