Page 70 of The Forest of Lost Souls

As the racket of the aircraft swells louder, Vida taps into a reserve of energy that for the moment had seemed not to exist. She springs forward, off the winding trail, taking as direct a path as the terrain and sparse brush allow. She avoids even the narrowest blades of sunlight that stab through gaps in the trees, as if they must be surveillance beams that can carry gigabytes of data to the searchers in the helo.

Although her life passes like a shadow, as do all lives, though she is but a moving shadow hurriedly navigating an architecture of stilled shadows, she feels that she is gaining substance moment by moment, becoming someone more formidable than she’s been heretofore. She is exhilarated. Dogs are in pursuit of her and vicious men with rifles are taking aim and searchers in a helicopter are busy seeking, and Boschvark is scheming to kill her in some other fashion if this attempt should fail—yet she is enlivened and elated by the rising risk, currently prey but soon to become a huntress. For years, she’s been uncertain of what the white-robed fortuneteller meant; then, when she understood, there had been additional years during which she doubted the woman’s strange, mystical prediction could be fulfilled. All doubt is gone. She might not survive, but for a time she’ll serve as theprotector of nature and all its creatures that the seer foresaw. She now wears the mantle of José Nochelobo. If she’s able to complete his mission, even if she perishes in the process, her short life will have been worth living. She runs, runs, runs, and all the shadows of the forest conspire to conceal her, seem to run with her like spirit guardians born out of the trees and risen from the earth, in celebration of her Becoming.

The evergreens shake, dead needles rain, dislodged pine cones rattle down through the branches, pine cones and something else. The helicopter is directly overhead.

57

BREAD UPON THE WATERS

A break in the trees. A swath of sky revealed. A clatter fills the heavens, and a shadow floats across the land.

At first, Galen Vector is merely surprised that a helicopter has joined this operation, but as it approaches, his surprise swells into apprehension when he discovers that no effort has been made to conceal that the aircraft belongs to one of Terrence Boschvark’s companies. The twin-engine executive chopper with high-set main and tail rotors, large enough to be configured for eight passengers, is emblazoned with the red-white-and-blue New World Technology logo.

Has Boschvark decided that killing Vida is so important, the need so urgent, he can no longer afford the delay that occurs when he works through surrogates to insulate himself from blame? What would drive him to take such a terrible risk? Maybe he thinks his political connections are so numerous and at such a high level that he is immune from not just prosecution but also accusation—and he might be right.

Perhaps he is confident that not only will he never be held to account for his crimes but also that he can set up his associates to take the fall for him. Set them up and take them out in engineered accidents or by arranging for murder to look like suicide. It’s not paranoid to consider such cold methodology. Vector himself hasdone as much to others who have served him well but ceased to be useful.

As if their actions are choreographed, Monger and Rackman pause in their ascent and take identical objects from coat pockets and plug them into their left ears. Communication devices of some kind.

With whom are they communicating?

No sooner is Galen Vector troubled by that question than it’s answered when the brothers tap their left ears and look up at the helo. Evidently they are receiving guidance from someone in the aircraft.

Which means they were expecting aerial support. No doubt about it now; they’re no longer his hired muscle. This istheirmission, not Vector’s. They have been freed from his menagerie of psychopaths and promoted into the ranks that directly serve Boschvark.

Vector has been used to marshal the search party on short notice, call up Crockett and his dogs, and be the sacrificial goat if something goes wrong. But why? He can’t always imagine how people like Boschvark think; their extreme wealth and power free them from most human concerns and furnish them with motivations that are as incomprehensible to Vector as those of aliens from another galaxy. They aren’t as easy to understand as parasitical crime families like the one that has long fed on this county. Maybe Boschvark has lost faith in that family and in Vector because Belden Bead was bested by Vida and then Nash Deacon also proved not to have the right stuff. Men like Boschvark often act as if impatience is as much a virtue as ambition; they want what they want, and they want it now. Whatever his reasons,Boschvark evidently wants Vida dead in half an hour or preferably in ten minutes, rather than later this afternoon.

Unlike the billionaire, Galen Vector relishes the process of vengeance, not just the fact of it. He wants Vida to know terror and pain, humiliation and despair. He wants to spend hours breaking her before he kills her, whereas Boschvark wants only to have someone put a bullet in her head and dispose of her corpse, thereby quickly eliminating the threat she poses and insuring against any further delay to his project. What infuriates Vector is that he was told he could deal with the bitch as he wished, to the satisfaction of his darkest desires—and now that promise has been broken.

The helicopter executes a turn, apparently with the intent of quartering the land ahead, now moving north to south. As it changes direction, its starboard flank comes into view. The large boarding door is open. A man sits on the threshold of the passenger cabin, legs dangling, tethered to prevent a fatal fall. He is holding what appears to be a cumbersome rifle featuring a short, fat barrel with a large bore that might be three inches in diameter.

Although no gunshot is audible, scores of small objects larger than buckshot burst from the muzzle, expelled at far less velocity than from a 12-gauge. They travel perhaps thirty or forty feet in a spreading pattern before dropping into the forest. The gun must be a low-pressure air rifle, similar to toys that fire tennis balls for dogs to chase or to facilitate a game of war among young boys. In this case, the shooter’s ammunition is a mystery. He inserts into the breech a cartridge approximately the size of a can of Coca-Cola, and again a swarm issues from the device like hornets erupting in anger from a tormented nest.

There is something otherworldly about the moment that renders Vector as transfixed as if he were witnessing an apparition. The helo floats through the morning, and in Galen’s curious bewitched state, he has ceased to hear its engine or its rotary wing, so that the craft seems as quiet as a hot-air balloon, weightless yet ominous. The tethered man, sporting a beard and long hair, looks like one who sang with Creedence Clearwater Revival a long time ago, or like someone who, in robes, once walked the shore of an ancient sea.Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days it will return to you.He’s heard those words before, though he can’t recall where. The good we have done returns to us, and the bad. Karma. No. That’s bullshit. Galen Vector doesn’t believe in any of that, not in an earned fate. Yet as the helicopter floats and as the bearded man casts something other than bread, and as the inexplicable silence lacks even the sound of Vector’s hard-pounding heart, he is afraid as he has never been before.

58

STICKY WIDGETS

In the downdraft from the chopper, debris cascades from the conifers. Dead needles, pine cones, what might have been intricately woven pieces of long-abandoned birds’ nests fall on Vida—and then harder objects rap against her like wind-driven hail. For a moment, she thinks insects are swarming, wasps or flying beetles, and she swats them.

These aren’t bugs, however, not living creatures, but inch-long capsules of some kind, as plump as fish-oil supplements, but with what appears to be a gray plastic or metal surface. They come to her not as a consequence of gravity, but as if with the intent of angry wasps or with the eager seeking of mosquitoes responding to the scent that announces a mammal with a feast of blood beneath its skin. Like nettles, they fix to her jacket and jeans. Although they lack the tiny hooks that make all catchweeds so difficult to pluck loose and though they are dry to the touch, they stick stubbornly to her clothes. She tries to brush them off, but they won’t be shaken loose.

Whatever these widgets are, they must have been dispensed from the helicopter. When she pinches one between her fingers, it seems as solid as a bullet, but she feels a faint vibration. They’re not inert. Compact technology of some kind. Possibly producedby one of Terrence Boschvark’s companies. With what purpose, what function?

She is reminded of Reyes Nochelobo, who traveled from Miami to Kettleton to settle his brother’s estate and who brought to her the brightly wrapped birthday gift that José hadn’t lived to give her. Reyes is ten years older than José and is afflicted with atrial fibrillation. He is on three medications, including a blood thinner, in addition to which something called a “Medtronic cardiac loop recorder” has been surgically implanted in his chest, in the hollow between two ribs; this device monitors his heart 24/7 and transmits the data to Medtronic in Minneapolis, from which it is available to his cardiologist by computer or smartphone. As José described it and as Reyes confirmed, the loop recorder has a five-year battery, can essentially transmit a continuous EKG to Medtronic from anywhere in the country as well as from many locations beyond its borders—and is approximately the size of one of these techno nettles that are stuck to her gear and clothes.

Maybe these widgets are nothing more than tracking devices, which is bad enough, but she can’t dismiss the possibility that some might have a different function. If so much data and telemetric capability can be packed into a cardiac loop recorder hardly bigger than a lozenge that soothes a sore throat, why couldn’t an object of similar size contain the stuff of a low-velocity smart bullet? An explosive charge. Tiny detonator. Technology that needs no marksman but guides the round to a target by some weird biological magnetism.

No. The lethality of a bullet is a consequence of its velocity, penetrative force, and deformation within the target; it carries no explosives. These widgets aren’t impacting her, just adheringto her. And they’re too small to contain a deadly quantity of C-4 or the like.

Unless ... If half the forty or more widgets sticking to her are smart bullets and even if each is capable of inflicting only a minor wound, she could still be disabled by the number of hits she takes and might even bleed out.

Science fiction. As Vida struggles to twist and pry widgets from her jacket, she’s scaring herself with science fiction. Yes, all right, but it’s become a science-fiction world—surveillance satellites, lasers, hypersonic nukes, virtual reality, designer babies, smartphones that have rapidly evolved into supercomputers, artificial intelligence. Technological advances have accelerated so rapidly that scientists and engineers, in their all-too-human hubris and greed, give little thought to the dark potential of even the brightest and shiniest of the new powers they harness, new toys they create, and new social theories they advance. All progress is said to be purely good, although history is replete with evidence this is not true. Those, like Vida, who have held fast to their common sense are increasingly concerned—in the grip of an uneasiness bordering on dread—that the escalating power of technology has grown beyond humanity’s ability to accurately assess its impact and control it, that we are the reckless agents of our annihilation.

As the racket of the helicopter fades, she tears off four of the widgets and drops them on a low rock formation that is as flat as a table and pounds them with a stone, but the fifth sticks to her right thumb as insistently as it had clung to her jacket. She is not a person who’s easily given to fear; however, her frustration grows into angry consternation when she isn’t able to shake off or strip away the damn thing. Search dogs are coming, as well as men withrifles, while she is still a mile away from the carcass of the crashed airplane in which she has stowed what she needs to survive the impending confrontation.

She unstraps her backpack and shrugs it off. Ten or twelve widgets cling to it. Four are fixed to her baseball cap, which she flings away among the trees. Her heart knocking, breath quick and shallow, she takes off her jacket and casts it aside.

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