Page 94 of The Forest of Lost Souls

“I don’t have a private vault.”

“Better get several. Here, there, everywhere.”

Out beyond the last of the treetops, the Grand Plateau comes into view.

Lupo and his pack race past Vida and Sun Spirit. The dogs break off their play to greet their wild cousins, but the wolves encourage the Alsatians to run west toward where the tableland meets a lower slope and the trees rise to provide cover.

In the south, Two Moon and Sam look up from their labors and toward the women. Something about their posture alerts Vida, and she turns to the north.

At first glance, as the rotorcraft approaches, it seems unreal because it glides through the air with so little sound that she can detect no sound at all.

Then she hears a muffled pulse or feels it more than hears it. She is reminded of the dream in which she and the fortuneteller are sitting on her porch at night, the moon four times its normalsize, José in the yard with a man who covers his face with one hand. In the dream this sound arises.What’s that? What’s coming?she asks. The seer says,Death. When you hear it elsewhere than in a dream, move fast. Do what is expected of a woman who runs with the wolves.

Even if Vida hadn’t stuck her nose in where it didn’t belong, even if she hadn’t inconvenienced him by killing everyone sent to kill her, even if she had never discovered that the Grand Plateau was a sacred Native American burial ground that would eliminate it as a site for a wind farm, Terrence Boschvark would hate her. She was José Nochelobo’s lover, which is reason enough toloathethe bitch. The sight of her standing defiantly down there in the tall grass with the Cheyenne womaninfuriateshim so much that he breaks into a sweat and feels his pulse pounding in his temples.

The .50-caliber machine gun can be operated either by the pilot or by whoever occupies the front passenger seat. Boschvark leans forward and presses a button to the right of the horizon indicator and below the altimeter. A panel drops out of the way, and a gun control extrudes. A targeting display appears on the windshield of the advanced glass cockpit, but he isn’t going for the kill right away. He opens fire. Even though the weapon is a recoilless rifle, and imparts no vibration to the helo, sound clatters through the aircraft as if they’re taking fire rather than laying it down.

“What the hell!” Yataghan exclaims.

Although he’s enraged, Boschvark replies in his Mr. Rogers voice. “Relax. There’s no one to see us being bad boys.”

“I know, I know. That’s not what I mean. Give me a chance to align with them. You’re wasting ammunition.”

“Now, now, Mack, I’m not wasting anything. I want to scare the crackers out of them first. I want them to run like rats, make them sorry for what they’ve done to me.ThenI’ll blast the shit out of them.”

“Well, okay,” Yataghan says, “if that’s your plan. But remember six hundred rounds can spit out quicker than you think with that baby.”

The moment ought to be a waking nightmare, but for Vida it has a dreamlike quality that is sublime instead of sinister, as if she has stepped out of the troubled world where she was born and into a magical realm. The forested mountains shelve high and higher to the east of her, as mysterious as a deep greenwood where creatures never named conduct lives unknowable, looming over what seems to be a slowly moving plateau as flat as the flight deck of a carrier ferrying souls from one existence to another. Wolves and dogs racing as if in harmonious celebration through tall grass from which erupt birds in song, the granddaughter of Eternal Fawn raising her right hand to scribe on the air a sign that might be meant to protect them from evil, the quiet rotorcraft racing toward her yet seeming to drift like a bubble aloft on a breeze as gentle as an infant’s breath—all that and other wondrous strange details infuse the day with grandeur and beauty that fill her with reverence.

My heart is ready.

A sudden noise. Bullets stitch the flatland, but the mortal stutter doesn’t shatter the mood. The flow of time has moderateduntil all action seems to be taking place in deep water, and even machine-gun fire fails to accelerate it. As the helo passes over her, she takes a quarrel from the quiver on her belt and turns toward the south in time to see Sam and Two Moon pitch forward into the grass, wounded or dead; if just wounded, then as good as dead with medical help so far away.

She reminds herself that what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. Repressing grief that would thwart her aim, bridling her anger, she winches the bowstring into place and slips a quarrel into the groove, her hands without a tremor.

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

Over the bodies of the fallen men, the helo executes a sweeping turn and heads north toward the women. Although without a weapon, Sun Spirit stands with Vida, faces the oncoming death machine, and does not sprint for cover. There is strength in solidarity, but also in suffering and in struggle and in hope.

Boschvark lays down a pattern of fire closer to the women than he did on the first pass, and yet they stand unflinching as the helo approaches, as though fearless, as if they embrace the prospect of martyrdom. But they are only rats, and they should run like rats, like the vermin they are, infecting the world with their diseased thinking.

“She’s got a crossbow,” Yataghan declares with enough alarm to suggest he actually believes that such a primitive weapon poses a threat to them when they’re cosseted in this magnificent rotorcraft.

“We’re not defenseless like Vector, Trott, and the others. She doesn’t have a forest to hide in this time. She’sright there. A .50-caliber burst from crotch to face will cut her in two like a paper doll.”

Just speaking the bitch’s fate in those terms both excites Boschvark and winds the watch spring of his rage even tighter, so that he no longer cares if he can make them run like frightened rats, only that he can slaughter and be done with them.

The engine cowling is directly above the cockpit. The turbine mounted therein, heretofore muffled by sound-reduction technology that is almost miraculous, proves less reliable than a real miracle, erupting in a clatter and shriek of tortured metal and three hard pneumonic coughs of a machine in need of oxygen.

Yataghan says, “Well, damn.”

Some successful shots with a crossbow can fairly be attributed to skill alone. Some owe more to luck. Some can be accounted as the result of skill and luck in rare combination. In this case, however, skill and luck seem to have been assisted by a mysterious power deserving of a humble thank-you, and Vida speaks those two words.

The turbine air intakes are on the sides of the engine cowling. The exhaust portal is at the front, where escaping hot gases drive the many blades of the engine on their exit from the system; this round opening looks to be fourteen or sixteen inches in diameter. The carbon quarrel scores a hit on that maw, penetrating far enough to distort and crack a few of the turbine blades. Shrapnelfrom the quarrel and the ruined blades turn the cowling into a rattlebox, instantly doing further damage.

The engine dies. The five Blue Edge blades of the rotary wing stutter to a stop. The helo arcs eastward, away from Vida and Sun Spirit. It confirms the truth of gravity, impacting hard, tumbling across this Land of Spirits Waiting in a cacophonous mangling, until it crashes into the first trees at the foot of the ascending slope.

The hush that was interrupted by Boschvark’s ill-considered assault returns to the plateau, but it endures mere seconds before shouting men disturb it. Vida and Sun Spirit pivot in surprise as Sam and Two Moon come running toward them, obviously not wounded. They had dropped to the ground to make more difficult targets of themselves.

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