Page 76 of The Forest of Lost Souls

Once Rackman starts shooting at the fuselage of the plane, the usually phlegmatic Monger becomes excited by the sound of gunfire, almost as inflamed as he gets in more intimate confrontations that involve knives and bludgeons and bare-handed strangulations. He hurries forward from the back of the procession, where he should remain to discourage Vector and Trott from doing something stupid, but when potential violence becomes manifest violence, he is quite capable of being stupid in his own right.

Of Monger and Rackman, the latter has a greater capacity for something like wisdom and for an approximation of self-control, which they both recognize. Indeed, they share a joke to the effect that, as to their relationship, Rackman is the brother and Monger the half brother. They both get off on violence, but Rackman is a connoisseur and Monger an eager enthusiast. They also recognize that on some occasions Monger’s reckless bloodlust ensures a kill when Rackman’s more carefully considered viciousness might have allowed the target to escape. They admire and respect each other for their different strengths.

And they are equally bewildered that their tedious half sister, Wendy, is committed to their redemption, with no desire to engage in a little satisfying violence of her own. She is a useful Christian, providing them with a home at no cost, cooking theirmeals, and doing their laundry. This is for the most part a convenient arrangement, but her faith in their potential for righteousness is annoying. If they are able one day to conceive of a lethal accident that no one can prove to have been murder, thereby inheriting Wendy’s house and estate without arousing suspicion, they will surprise her with their true contempt. However, considering their reputation, escaping blame for offing their sister is less likely than getting away with other murders, because those who hire them as hitmen are powerful people with a vital interest in ensuring that Rackman and Monger escape arrest and indictment.

So in the current case, Monger can only pretend that it’s not this Vida person cowering in the aircraft, that it’s his sister. As he joins Rackman and opens fire, he has sufficient imagination to see the bullets tearing through Wendy’s body and shattering her skull.

By the time Monger empties the magazine of his AR-15, Rackman has reloaded and is ready to blast away again. In the brief moment of silence between barrages, the echoes of gunfire having quickly faded away through the muffling trees, an unexpected and bizarre event occurs. Monger happens to be looking at his brother when it appears that a long metal bolt erupts from the side of his thick neck, as if he is the Frankenstein monster in a disguise that is suddenly coming undone.

Rackman stumbles sideways into a tree and turns his head toward Monger. He’s walleyed, and an eruption of snot hangs from his nose. He opens his mouth as if to ask what just happened, spews blood, and collapses. Dead.

In the aircraft lie four locks of hair that Vida cut off with the wickedly sharp combat knife. Attached to the hair are four tech ticks transmitting the location where the barbering occurred.

She stands in shadows slightly uphill and far to the west of the gathered posse, sheltered on three sides by a stone formation. The raccoon, which she chased from the plane before she departed, has gone its own way.

Although she is perhaps a hundred and twenty or thirty yards from her target, the crossbow has a powerful scope, a maximum-distance range of almost four hundred yards, and no less accuracy than a rifle.

My heart is ready.

The moment she has fired at one gunman, she uses the built-in crank to winch the bowstring into place. She is so well practiced at this, she can perform the task almost as fast as if she manually cocked the weapon with a foot in the stirrup.

The quiver attached to her belt contains high-quality carbon quarrels, and she loads one in the barrel.

With a 150-pound draw, the crossbow delivers the quarrel—–the bolt—at devastating velocity.

Although there is recoil with which to deal, there is no sound of a shot, thus robbing the other men in the posse of the ability to gauge her position with any accuracy.

From where Galen Vector stands, just for an instant it looks as though Rackman has thrown down his rifle and dropped to his knees in prayer. Then the hulk falls forward on his face, and it’s impossible to believe that such an arrogant man, who’s able tocommit extreme violence without a twinge of conscience, would prostrate himself before anyone or anything. Rackman is dead, as though felled by a curse murmured by a voodoo priest a thousand miles away.

Monger turns from the corpse, his brow furrowed with confusion, his mouth open in disbelief, as if he’s forgotten where he is and doesn’t know how he got here. A horn sprouts from his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose, and the center of his face appears to fold inward as if there’s a void behind it.

In defense of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

Following José Nochelobo’s death and the informative visit from the mortician’s daughter, Anna Lagare, Vida acquired the crossbow and a large number of quarrels in a neighboring state, where neither a permit nor an ID was required for the purchase. When this grisly business is finished, when these hateful men are no longer a threat, she can dispose of the weapon in such a way that no one can trace it to her.

When the crossbow is cocked, she quickly places another quarrel in the barrel, making sure to align the vane with the channel, and then nocks it in place.

One of the pursuers pivots in an arc, indiscriminately firing his AR-15, spooked into returning fire even with no target on which to draw a bead.

My life passes like a shadow. Yet a little while, and all will be consummated.

She brings the shooter close in the crosshairs of the scope and gently squeezes the trigger. With apop!the quarrel flies.

Although Frank Trott has ginned up anger toward his ex-wife to distract himself, nevertheless he keeps thinking of his dead mother gazing up at him from within the barrel before he welded it shut and dropped her in the bog all those years ago. As Monger fires at the airplane and Rackman reloads, Frank realizes it’s the fact of Nash Deacon and Belden Bead buried in their cars—their barrels—that’s causing him to obsess on the image of his mother. Strong men, hard men, yet killed and packed in their barrels and rolled into their gravesby a woman. Neither regret nor remorse is troubling him, after all. He is loath to admit that it’s fear, for he’s not a fearful man, but indeed it’s fear of cosmic retribution that has a grip on him. Then Rackman takes a hit.

Rackman goes down hard, and Monger goes down harder, but Galen Vector is surprised that anything could rattle Frank Trott so much that he would crack and start shooting at bogeys, phantoms, nothing at all, but that’s just what happens. When the rifle is out of ammo, Trott starts shouting challenges to Vida while he ejects the spent magazine and jams in a fresh one, screaming his fury at the top of his voice. In those old World War II movies set on islands in the Pacific, the hero always becomes exasperated that his platoon is being pinned down; in an act of courage few mortals can match, he charges up the hill toward the machine-gunemplacement, issuing a cry of outrage, heedless of danger, and takes out the two enemy soldiers hunkered behind a triple-thick wall of sandbags. This is exactly like that, except Frank is turning in a circle instead of charging up a hill, not in a valorous act born out of bravery, but in pure animal terror. Unlike the hero in a movie, Frank is deleted in a flamboyance of blood when a crossbow bolt apparently enters his open mouth and exits the back of his neck.

Sam Crockett has wisely fallen flat to the ground and pulled his dogs close to him. But Vector thinks it’s even wiser to admit that the woman they’ve come to kill is no powder puff, and run for it.

Sherlock, Whimsey, and Marple don’t shy from action or trouble. The dogs are lying in hart’s-tongue ferns, pressing against Sam as he has commanded, but they’re still ready for the hunt. Aware of the tumult among the members of the posse but uncertain of the cause, alert to the gunfire but willing to entertain the possibility that the sound is celebratory rather than evidence of a serious threat, they swish their tails through the leathery fronds of the ferns, panting and shivering with repressed excitement.

For Sam Crockett, it’s Afghanistan writ small. He can handle this. Pressed to the ground, he feels and hears his heart measuring the danger, pulse elevated but not racing, clocking under eighty beats per minute. He’s never suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, largely thanks to the company of dogs, to the sense of family and the love they give him. He can handle this.

When Rackman is cut down, Sam is surprised. When Monger is dispatched, astonishment gives way to understanding. Back in the day, in one of the more remote regions of the Hindu Kush, high on those treacherous slopes, a Pashtun villager had chosen to forsake the common AK-47 for a crossbow. He came from a settlement without running water and with an open-pit community latrine, yet from some sympathetic foreign-aid group, he acquired the finest available compound crossbow, a powerful scope made in Switzerland, and a seemingly infinite supply of quarrels with four-sided points. His silent killing had a chilling psychological effect on the men with whom Sam served—but in time they put an end to him.

Immediately when Frank Trott is taken out, Galen Vector decides to split. Obviously, he knows nothing about the strategy of retreat that is most likely to ensure survival. He turns away from the scene with the evident intent to retrace, as fast as possible, the path they followed here. A man’s broad back offers an enticing target. And though even an experienced bowman might take ten seconds to cock the weapon and nock the quarrel and take aim, no one is fleet enough to outrun a projectile with a range of a fifth of a mile and the power to punch through plate armor. Judging by the way Vector falls between one step and another, without a cry, and lies as motionless as the stratified rock of which the mountain under them is formed, Sam concludes that the quarrel cored his heart.

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