Page 71 of The Forest of Lost Souls

The chopper isn’t coming back. Evidently, they know she’s been tagged. Like a cardiologist calling up a patient’s Medtronic data, the killers on her trail know everything they need to know about her, although their intention is to take a life rather than sustain one.

Four of the devices are fixed to her jeans. She draws the knife from the sheath on her left hip. Shaves the razor-sharp edge along one leg. Reaps a thin fuzz of denim. She scales a widget from the fabric, but now the thing clings to the knife. She holds the blade to the table rock and pounds the stubborn burr with a stone until it dimples and falls away like a techno tick. Soon she’s dealt with the remaining three, plus one fixed to her left hiking shoe.

The woods behind her slope down through layered shadows, with little evidence that morning was born earlier and is now mature. A flock of yellow-breasted western tanagers wings through a shaft of light, the soft whistles of their flight calls like the musical conversation of elves in this Gothic forest. Farther below, in another narrow intrusion of sunlight, a figure more menacing than birds looms into sight, a big man laboring upward, not near enough to be an immediate threat, but confident of where he will find what he seeks, and then behind him appears another.

Vida steps out of sight and stands with her back against the trunk of a tree. She slices the blade of her knife across the widget that’s fastened to her hand. Although sharp enough to score stone, the cutting edge leaves no mark on the tracking device, suggesting that the thin capsule is made of an alloy stronger than steel.

Taking a deep breath and holding it, she presses the blade to her thumb and forces it under the widget, attempting to dislodge the thing as she had scaled others from her jeans. Whatever force binds the object to her is disrupted with a hot flash of pain. Taking with it two layers of skin, the capsule drops to the ground as her thumb darkens with a sheen of blood that forms into a trickle and drizzles toward her wrist.

Without realizing what she’s doing, she sheathes the knife and takes several steps from the tree and finds herself kneeling before a low shrub with deep-green leaves. Although she knows the names of many plants, this one is strange to her. She isn’t any version of a knowledgeable homeopath when it comes to the offerings in Nature’s pharmacy, yet she plucks a leaf from its stem and folds it around her abraded thumb and applies pressure with her left hand as if she has no doubt as to what the effect will be. Her hair is an issue; there are widgets in it, but she doesn’t dare delay to deal with them here, as the posse closes on her. She finds herself on her feet and moving fast uphill, south-southeast, neither on a beaten trail nor seeking one, confident that she can’t become lost. The makeshift bandage doesn’t peel away from the abrasion; instead, some substance in the leaf seems to combine with her blood to quell the pain and then to form a coagulating plaster that quickly stops the bleeding.

Her arcane knowledge, previously unrecognized, is only the consequence of her Becoming. Although she is no pagan, in someway she can’t understand, the power of a myth that’s thousands of years old is flowering in her. The ancient Greeks spoke of Artemis, the goddess of the moon and the hunt, protector of women and of Nature, while the early Romans called her Diana. No such goddess has ever existed, and yet theideaof such a figure has power that time and the passage of civilizations cannot erase, a power that has come down through the centuries to the motherless daughter of a police officer who was murdered when his child was only five. In this time of crisis, Nature and her imperiled creatures need a champion, and some mysterious entity has chosen Vida to resist the destroyers like Terrence Boschvark.

As she runs through the forest at a pace she has not achieved before, sprinting like a deer, never putting a foot wrong, with no weakness of muscle or bone, she is breathing no harder than if she were resting in a chair on her porch, and her heart is not laboring. She wonders if she might be losing her mind, but her new agility and stamina, along with her instinctive awareness of where she is in this wilderness and where she must go, seem to be evidence not of disorder but of stability, not of insanity but of a primal wisdom.

The men who are after her have such contempt for women that they expect to overtake her quickly, overpower her easily, destroy her with pleasure. Her intention has been to lead them deep into these mountains, along a circuitous route, frustrating and confusing them until physical weariness and nervous exhaustion make them less alert, as vulnerable as they will ever be. Recent events necessitate a change of plans. She needs to reach the crashed airplane that she furnished as an armory and take down her enemies sooner than later.

Vida breaks out of the trees and reaches the sun-splashed crest of the ridge. Bright blue flowers ofGentiana vernablanket the fertile earth between the shapes of bedded stone.

Having put some distance between herself and her pursuers, she can afford to pause long enough to deal with the few widgets tangled in her hair, but a better idea occurs to her. If she keeps moving fast, there is an advantage to being tracked. She races north along the ridge, across treacherous rock formations, with the alacrity of a surefooted mountain sheep. After a few hundred yards, she turns due east, plunging along a slope into a new neighborhood of less dense forest, through maidenhair ferns and snowy wood rush, having no concern about cougars or snakes, and certainly not about wolves.

59

REMEMBERING MOTHER

Frank Trott, now engaged in the pursuit of Vida, is the son of Tatum Tyler Trott, an associate of the Bead crime family. Tatum was a nonbeliever so serious about his atheism that he brutally murdered a minister and his wife, used a reciprocating saw to cut them into manageable pieces, bundled each of the twelve grisly portions—legs, arms, heads, and torsos—in a segment of plastic tarp with a ten-pound plate from the weight stack for the bench press he hadn’t used in years, sealed the tarps with epoxy, and dropped the packages into a nine-acre lake on his property in a mock baptismal ceremony. Tatum was a good manager of the Bead family’s illegal gambling activities and a successful debt collector for them. However, all his energy in high school had gone into bullying other students and terrifying teachers and building a record as a legendary truant, so that he lacked the most rudimentary scientific knowledge. He was undone by ignorance and a tendency to miserliness. The epoxy that he purchased was an inferior brand that succumbed to the acidity of the water. Although the lake appeared placid, the inflow and outflow of the stream feeding it and the action of wind created currents that worked at the edges of the tarps and rolled the bundles this way and that on the lake bed. Even wrapped in plastic, the gruesome packages contained enough oxygen to assist decomposition, which producedfoul gases, creating disassembling pressure within the tarps. Frank, eighteen years old at the time, had been fishing when a corrupted, somewhat greenish arm wallowed into sight, fingers curled and thumb raised as if soliciting a boat ride. Frank’s first thought was that this must be his mother’s arm, because she had supposedly run off with a traveling salesman. But that had been five years earlier, and this limb had not been rotting in the lake that long. He netted it, brought it aboard, and studied it for a while. One decaying finger still wore a ring that declared JESUSHEALS, like the one long worn by Abigail Costigan, wife of Reverend Wayne Costigan, both of whom had gone missing two months earlier.

Although Frank recently graduated from high school, he was very much his father’s son, with little interest in education and less interest in honest work, but with a keen eye for opportunity. He wrapped the reeking arm in a beach towel and took it directly to Horace and Katherine Bead, who were parishioners of All Faiths Church of the Holy Nativity and who in fact had financed the building of it and the installation of the minister who preceded Wayne Costigan and the one who followed him. Everyone in Kettleton knew that Horace and Katherine loved their church and were devoted to God. Frank’s father, Tatum, also knew the Beads’ reputation as devout Christians, but when arrested he assumed his detailed and highly incriminating knowledge of the family’s gambling operations would protect him from prosecution.

He was wrong.

The lake was dragged on a Monday, when all additional pieces of the Reverend and Mrs. Costigan were recovered, although nothing of Frank’s mother, Enola, was found. Tatum was arraigned that same day. His trial commenced on Wednesday. He might have been pronounced guilty by Friday if he hadn’t hangedhimself in his jail cell in the early morning hours of Thursday. Although Tatum left no will, the grateful county government, impressed by young Frank’s sense of civic duty and his refusal to be cowed by his violent father, passed a special statute conveying to the young man his father’s land and other assets. On a stormy night a year later, when Enola returned, announced that she was moving in, and declared herself the rightful owner of the place, Frank did not make the same mistakes that Tatum had made. Along with a few twenty-pound plates from the remains of his dad’s bench press, he stuffed his mom’s corpse into a metal drum to which he had welded four wheels and a strong tow chain. With Enola packed and ready to go, he welded a lid to the barrel. Having hitched the wheeled casket to his F-150 pickup, he towed it not to the lake but instead overland to a portion of his property that had been a bog since time immemorial. On the brow of a hill, he detached the barrel from the truck. He pushed it over the brink and watched as it gathered speed in the light of the full moon. As if it were some hellish conveyance serving as an alternative to a boat on the river Styx, trundling damned souls from the freedom of life into eternal servitude, it rattled down the slope, launched off the bank below, and landed with a tremendous splash in the swampy muck, where it sank out of sight into such deep, viscous sludge that it might eventually come to rest among dinosaur bones.

Because of the things he has done and the things that have been done to him, Frank Trott has an intuitional awareness of when he is in deep shit and exactly how deep it is. When the chopper appears, when Monger and Rackman—Tweedledum and Tweedledee—insert what appear to be communication devices in their ears and make contact with someone aboard the aircraft, thenature of this operation proves not to be what he believed it was, and he thinks he is in shit above his ankles. Then a guy aboard the helo begins to disperse swarms of objects with what looks like a tennis-ball gun, and Frank recalculates the depth as somewhere around his knees.

Following the departure of the helicopter, Monger begins to consult a device with a screen—not a phone, something Frank has never seen before. Then Monger announces, “She’s been tagged.”

“Tagged?” Galen Vector says. “Tagged?Since when have we been playing tag? What do you mean—tagged?”

Monger’s deadpan expression conveys less emotion than an iron skillet, but Rackman says, “The little lady has a real bad case of cootie bots.”

Monger smiles. It’s the first time Frank has seen either of the brothers manage a genuine smile, and it is as disturbing a sight as a severed, rotting arm floating in the family lake. Monger says, “Cootie bots calling out to us wherever she goes.”

“Song of the cootie bots,” Rackman says to Monger.

Monger says to Rackman, “Coo-coo-cootie.”

For a moment, it seems as if the brothers might laugh, which will be another first and not good. Instinct tells Frank that if the brothers break into audible mirth, they will punctuate the laughter with gunfire, and there will be blood.

“What the hell’s going on here?” Galen Vector demands.

Although Vector appears angry, even enraged, Frank senses something greater than anger in his boss’s demeanor, an underlying wariness that suggests he understands that Boschvark’s confidence in him has diminished and that his position might not be secure. Worse, the billionaire’s bold poaching of Bead family enforcers—Monger and Rackman, who now seem to work forhim—suggests that Boschvark’s decided to terminate his arrangement with the Beads and proceed with his Kettleton project without their assistance.

Evidently, Sam Crockett has reached a similar conclusion. “If the woman has been tagged,” he tells Vector, “if she can be tracked electronically, my dogs have done their part getting you this far. No point paying us when we’re not needed.”

“Screw that,” Vector declares. “I’m supposed to believe in cootie bots? I believe in what I can see myself, not what a couple sellouts tell me to believe. The dogs still have the scent. I can see they have the scent, how they’re straining at the leash. Get them on it. You answer to me. Everyone here answers to me whether they think so or not.”

With his torched face, Crockett isn’t easy to read, but Frank is sure the dog handler is furious that he was lied to about their intentions toward the woman and wants out of this. Crockett’s also perceptive enough to know that Vector is incensed that Boschvark has hired away the brothers without approval, that he is not going to tolerate even the smallest additional threat to his authority. If Crockett tries to walk away, Vector will kill the dogs. Therefore, Crockett won’t walk away, but his simmering resentment will add to the instability of the situation.

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