Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff

Roger stood crying with his face covered in soot and smoke rising from his head; Arlo, watching from the sidelines, smiled.
    On page eight, Arlo was alone again, and unhappy…
    The same basic sequence was repeated over and over. Each explosion was a little more powerful than the last one. A boy named Gregg Faulkner who picked up a booby-trapped cereal box didn’t just lose his hair, one of his eyes was X-ed out. A girl named Jody Conrad lost both her eyes, and a boy named Tariq Williams lost a hand. In the most gruesome scene of all, a boy named Harold Rodriguez jetted so much blood from the stumps of his arms that Arlo had to break out an umbrella.
    I looked over at True. “You know, I know you guys are obsessed with secrecy, but this is like beyond tasteless…”
    “What you’re holding isn’t an internal organization report,” he told me. “It’s a facsimile of a notebook discovered during a search of Arlo Dexter’s apartment.”
    “He drew this himself? How old is he?”
    “Thirty-two. That’s chronological age, of course. His mental self-image—”
    “Who cares?” I interrupted. “When do I kill him?”
    “Soon. But there are some questions we’d like answered first, if possible. Turn to the next page.”
    On the page following the Harold Rodriguez bloodbath, Arlo was center stage again, but this time he’d been joined by three other stick figures. Not people. Monkeys. Two of them had him bookended and were whispering to him in stereo; the third monkey stood nearby, holding a black briefcase.
    On the next page, the briefcase was lying open on the ground, and Arlo was on his knees beside it with his hands clasped and his mouth forming an O of perfect joy. The monkeys clustered behind him, looking pleased by his reaction. As for the briefcase, the drawing didn’t show what was in it, but whatever it was was pumping out yellow and orange rays of light, and given Arlo’s habits it wasn’t hard to come up with possibilities.
    “Do we know who these other guys are?” I asked.
    “That’s one of the questions we’d like answered.”
    “I suppose Al Qaeda would be too obvious, huh?”
    “Not too obvious, just unlikely. Arlo Dexter is an apolitical psychopath, not an Islamic jihadist. Besides, look at the way he’s drawn them. To depict Arabs as monkeys would almost certainly be an expression of contempt. But Mr. Dexter isn’t contemptuous of his new associates. He admires them.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Turn the page.”
    On the next page—actually a two-page spread, and the last drawing in the notebook—Arlo was on the move again, carrying the black briefcase towards some sort of fenced-in area where a huge crowd of stick-figures was gathered. I could tell it was Arlo carrying the briefcase because he was still wearing his shirt and short pants.But he had a new head on his shoulders: he’d become a monkey too, now.
    “I take it you don’t know what his target is, either.”
    “No,” said True, “and that’s the most important question of all. If Dexter’s confederates aren’t imaginary, then stopping him may not be enough; there could be other monkeys with briefcases.”
    “Have you thought about just asking him who his buddies are? I mean, you guys do do interrogations, right?”
    “We do, and it may come to that. But the more effective methods of extracting information tend to be time-consuming, and we don’t believe we have much time. So we’ve decided instead to keep a close watch on Dexter and see what he does. Your job will be to help with the surveillance and perform any other tasks that may come up; and if it looks as though Dexter is about to complete his mission, you’ll see to it that he doesn’t succeed.”
    “Cool,” I said. “Where’s my gun?”
    “It’ll be delivered to you shortly. For now, go with Annie and do as she says; she’s been fully briefed on the details of the operation.”
    “With Annie, right…Listen, True, can I talk to you