43 FACELESS MEN ARE COMING

43

FACELESS MEN ARE COMING

In the dream, standing in her yard, Vida is armed with a crossbow, firing quarrels at the moon to remind it to illuminate her way faithfully with its full sphere even when, for everyone else, it has waned into the thinnest Cheshire-cat smile. She cranks back the bowstring and locks it and loads another quarrel in the groove and aims high, to gently pock the lunar surface with a reminder of her enduring love and authority. When she triggers the weapon, however, the fired bolt travels far short of its target and proves to be a unique firework that produces not pinwheels or fountains of bright metallic salts, but instead casts across the sky hundreds of small moons in sizes ranging from that of an orange to that of a melon. Those shapes don't fade as other fireworks do. They descend in glowing splendor and bounce off the lawn, transforming into silver-gray wolves as they rebound and caracole. A moment of beauty and delight dissolves into high alarm, not because the wolves mean her any harm, but because some of those miniature moons transform not into wolves but into men without faces, those who conspired to kill José Nochelobo. They have come to kill her, too.

She rolls up from sleep and out of bed and onto her feet with the immediate wakefulness of a firefighter answering the firehouse bell. The dream was more than a dream; it was an alarm. Although she hasn't expected trouble until long after dawn on Monday, perhaps not until Tuesday or Wednesday, she has nonetheless slept in the clothes she needs for the long trek into the mountains. She switches on the lamp. Her hiking boots stand bedside. She sits to pull them on and lace them up.

The pistol she took from Nash Deacon is on the nightstand, as is the scabbard in which he'd sheathed it. She threads the scabbard onto her belt and holsters the pistol.

How many are coming she can't foresee. She is sure only that it isn't merely one or two. She can't say what will happen to her, only that she is mortal and the odds of survival are low, of triumph even lower. She is afraid; she would be a fool if she were not afraid, but she will not surrender to dread.

From the closet, she retrieves a waterproofed leather jacket with a fleece lining and slips her arms into its sleeves. Even at this time of year, the nights are likely to be chilly in the higher elevations. She's prepared a backpack lighter than those she carried into the woods the previous day, approximately fifteen pounds of gear including two days' worth of food; she shrugs into it and secures the straps. From a shelf, she takes down a pair of high-powered binoculars and hangs them around her neck.

The folded page of notepaper is in a pocket of her jeans where she tucked it before bed. She takes it out and opens it and reads the words that have long baffled her.

. . . two moon sun spirit below the smoking river . . .

She folds the paper and returns it to her pocket.

She switches off the lamp and makes her way to the back door with the aid of a flashlight and leaves the house that has been her home for twenty-three years and keys the deadbolt locks. The sun is hours from rising, and the moon is mid sky, cratered by impacts that perhaps foretell the fate of Earth.

She veers away from the multipurpose building in which the old Ford pickup is garaged and enters the forest at the west end of the meadow. Among the second rank of trees, she sits on a table of rock skirted by Polypodium, a fern that rises from licorice-scented rootstock. She watches and waits and wonders.

She thinks, Have pity on those who love and are separated, on the lonely, on those who mourn, on those who fear, on all the little animals that live their lives as prey.