The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (21 page)

Or so we thought. Sam tics with her neck; I look over her shoulder and see a guy sitting alone staring at us over his drink. He could be my dad, if my dad had forgotten to bring a condom to his junior prom. Short, stout, but really fit; looks like a cooper built his torso. The man’s never heard of moisturizer. He’s wearing a black pinstripe shirt with a skinny leather tie, black pleated pants and black ankle-boots. I am sure some cute sales girl had dressed him—because nobody who cared about him would’ve let him leave the house looking like dog’s dinner.

And now—shit—I scrutinized him too long. He comes over, beer in hand.

“Ladies,” he says.

“We’re not hookers,” says Sam. “I know these dresses might give a gentleman the wrong impression.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” I add, big smile.

“Right,” he says, and turns on his heel.

“Hold on, Gavin,” says Will, who’s just pulled up with my Moscow Mule. “Don’t let these two termagants scare you off. Make a little room for Gavin, Sam, will you?”

Gavin considers us a moment, then pulls up the stool next to Samantha and offers his hand. “Gavin Howard.”

“Oh!” says Sam. She’s suddenly unironically warm—a rare demeanor for her. “You’re the forest ranger. Dad’s told me about you. I’m Sam.”

I put out my hand. “And I’m Gabby. Gabby Reál.”

“A pleasure,” he says, then proceeds to purée my knucklebones—one of those insecure guys who has to try to destroy the other person’s hand. Charming.

“This man’s a national hero,” Will says to me. “He’s keeping our unicorns safe.”

Now
that
is interesting. Back in the States, we’ve heard reports of unicorns appearing in forests throughout Great Britain. But in this age of photo manipulation it’s hard to get anyone to believe anything anymore.

So I say as much: “Plenty of Americans don’t think unicorns are real, you know.”

“Oh, they’re real, Ms. Reál,” says Gavin, pleased with his wit. As if I hadn’t heard that one 20 billion times.

“Americans,” says Samantha. “You never think anything interesting could possibly be happening anywhere else in the world, do you?”

The Brits share a chuckle. I don’t join in.

“We shouldn’t insult our visitor,” says Will. “I mean, if she were to tell us snaggletoothed pookahs started appearing in California, I suppose I’d want better proof than a picture.” He leans to Gavin and adds, “Gabby’s a reporter for
The San Francisco Squint
. Her column’s called ‘Let’s Get Reál.’ Two million read it every week, don’t you know.”

Gavin sizes me up. No, it’s a deeper, more serious stare: he
appreciates
me, like a squinting jeweler. “I’m all for reality. I have no patience for falsehood. I wish more people would ‘get reál.’” His voice gets weirdly sincere.

I lean toward him and say, “Me too. My column’s subtitle is ‘Truth or Death.’” I smile and sip my Mule.

It’s not the first time I’ve flirted to land an interview. Gavin drinks the rest of his beer but never takes his eyes off me. Neither do Will or the slightly-disgusted Sam, who sees exactly what’s happening.

But screw her; a story’s a story. Gavin sets down his glass and says the words I am longing to hear: “You know, I’m working the New Forest this weekend. If you’d like, it would be my pleasure to take you with me. You might just see a unicorn for yourself.”

I thought this would make a nice fluffy piece for my column. I mean, unicorns!

Gavin—who is completely professional and hands-off, thank God—and I are having a delightful Sunday-morning hike through some less-traveled parts of the New Forest. It’s everything an American could want of an English woods: fields of heath; majestic oaks and alders; rivers that run as slow as wisdom itself; and ponies! Thousands of ponies roaming feral and free like a reenactment of my girlhood fantasies.

Of course, that sets my Spidey-sense tingling. Wouldn’t it be easy enough for rumors of unicorns to sprout up in a place with so many darling ponies ambling about?

This is what I am thinking when we come across a thick, almost unbroken trail of blood.

“Hornstalkers,” Gavin says. And when he sees I’m not following: “Unicorn poachers. Of all the luck.”

He calls it in on some last-century transceiver. HQ wants more information. They tell him to send me home and to follow the blood trail with extreme caution. “Do not attempt to apprehend them on your own,” says HQ.

“Understood.”

“I mean it, Gavin. Don’t go showing off in front of your lady- friend.”

“I said ‘Understood.’” He stows the transceiver and adds: “Wanker.” And then to me he says, “Well Gabby, it’s poachers. Dangerous people. HQ says I’m supposed to send you home.”

“Just try,” I reply.

“Atta girl.”

We hustle through the wilderness, following a grim trail of blood, snapped branches, hoofprints and bootprints. Gavin jogs ahead, while I do my best to keep up. He’s a totally different person out here, absolutely in-tune with the forest. He’s half hound, loping with canine abandon through this forest, then stopping suddenly to cock his head to listen, sniff the air.

It’s also clear he’s used to running with a high-powered rifle in-hand. He told me, as he strapped on its back-holster before we left his truck, that he was bringing it “just in case.” So here we are.

He stops suddenly and crouches. I do too. From one of his cargo-pants pockets he pulls a Fey Spy, a top-of-its-class RC flying drone that looks like a green-gold robot hummingbird.

He tosses it into the air and it hovers, awaiting orders; using a controller/display-screen the size of a credit card, he sends the little drone bulleting into the forest.

I peer over Gavin’s shoulder at the display and am treated to a fast-forward version of the terrain that awaits us. Gavin’s a great pilot. The drone zooms and caroms through the woods with all the finesse of a real hummingbird.

And then we see them: the poachers, two of them. They wear balaclavas and camouflage jumpsuits, the kind sporting-goods stores love to sell to amateurs.

Between them walks a little girl. A little girl on a metal dog leash.

I’d judge her to be eight or nine. She’s dressed for summer, tank-top and shorts and flip-flops; she’s muddy to her ankles. Her head hangs, and her hair, the colors of late autumn, curtains her face. The collar around her neck is lined with fleece. (To prevent chafing, I presume? How considerate.) The leash seems mostly a formality, however, as it has so much slack that its middle almost dips to the ground.

“What the hell?” I whisper. “What’s with the girl?”

Gavin, slowly and evenly, says, “Some hornstalkers believe that unicorns are attracted to virgin girls. So they kidnap one to help them in their hunt.”

“What? You can’t be serious.”

Gavin shrugs. “One too many fairy tales when they were kids, I guess.”

I can only imagine what is going through that poor girl’s head. Kidnapping alone is already more evil than anyone deserves. But as a girl I loved horses, ponies and especially unicorns. If unicorns had existed in our timeline when I was young, they would have dominated my every daydream. I can’t imagine how scarred I would have been if I’d been forced by poachers to serve as bait. To watch them murder one right in front of me. Dig the horn out of its skull.

Gavin gives my wrist a fortifying squeeze. Then he hands me the RC controller, takes out his walkie-talkie and, as quietly as he can, reports what he’s seen to HQ. I use the Fey Spy to keep an eye on the
poachers. The group is moving forward cautiously. The girl’s stooped, defeated gait fills me with dread.

Gavin has a conversation with the dispatcher that I can’t quite make out. When he’s done, he pockets the transceiver and looks at me. Then he holds out his rifle to me with both hands.

“This,” he says, “is a Justice CAM-61X ‘Apollo’ sniper rifle. It has an effective range of 1,700 meters. It’s loaded with .50 caliber Zeus rounds. They’re less-lethal bullets. Bad guys get hit by these, they lose all muscular control, shit their pants and take a nap. Then we just mosey up and cuff ‘em.”

I squint. “1,700 meters in a desert, maybe. You’d have to be halfway up their asses to get a clear shot, with all these trees.”

He pats the rifle. “Not with these bullets, love. They’re more like mini missiles, with onboard targeting computers and everything. They can dodge around obstacles to reach their target. Especially,” he emphasizes, “if we can create a virtual map of the forest between us and the target.”

Lightbulb. “Which we can make with the Fey Spy.”

He nods. “Listen Gabby. That girl’s in great peril. We’re on the clock here. We can’t wait for backup.”

As a journalist, my ethics require me to remain disinterested when covering a story. Fuck you, journalistic ethics. “What you need me to do?”

He points at RC display/controller in my hand. “You any good flying one of these?”

“I’m a reporter. I make my living spying on people with drones.”

Gavin smiles. Then: “I need you to fly the Fey Spy back to us, slowly and from high up in the canopy, so that it can map the forest between us and the poachers. Then fly it back over to them and keep them in the Fey Spy’s field of vision. It’ll automatically transmit the map of the forest to my rifle. Once it’s done, it’s as simple as bang bang bang. Everyone goes down.”

I nod in agreement at first, before I realize this: “Wait. Bang bang
bang
? Three bangs? There are only two poachers.”

His face goes green and guilty. “Well, we can’t have the girl running scared through the forest. She could hurt herself.”

I wait a second for the punchline, because he can’t be serious. But of course he is. “Oh my God. Are you insane? You are not shooting the girl!”

“She’ll just take a little nap.”

“And shit her pants. You said she would shit her pants.”

“She’s not even wearing pants.”

“Gavin!”

Gavin puts his finger to his lips.

“Sorry,” I whisper.

“Look, if you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears.”

“I do,” I say. “You shoot the poachers. I’ll handle the girl.”

Gavin’s dubious. “That girl’s undergone a severely traumatic sequence of experiences. I’m not sure a team of highly-trained psychologists could handle her right now.”

“She’ll be even more traumatized if you shoot her. Look, I admit it’s not a great option. We just don’t have any better ones. As soon as you have a lock on the hornstalkers, you take them out. I’ll fly the Fey Spy to the girl and keep her entertained until backup arrives.”

He’s shaking his head. “What if she runs?”

“I’ll go get her myself. She won’t get far. She’s in flip-flops.”

He’s about to argue, but decides against it. “Out of time,” he sighs. “We do it your way. Don’t fuck up.”

“Don’t miss.”

Gavin aims the rifle ahead, looks into the scope with one eye, winks the other. I look back to the Fey Spy display-screen, catch up with my targets. They’ve barely moved at all. As if they’re not sure what to do next. “I don’t think these guys are pros,” I say to Gavin.

“Unicorn horn is worth a mint,” he says, his aim never wavering. “Every imbecile with a gun wants a piece of the action. Start flying the Fey Spy back to us.”

I do, slaloming left and right through the forest in large swaths as I fly. It’s a little over ten minutes before we make visual contact with our little hummingbird robot.

“Good job,” says Gavin, checking his rifle’s readout. “We’ve almost got what we need. Fly the Fey Spy back over to them.”

By the time I catch up with the poachers again, they are crouching behind a pair of trees, trying to peer into a hole the wounded unicorn must have punched through the forest as it fled. The girl stands next to the poacher with her leash around his wrist. She’s as still as a Degas
ballerina.

Within the space of a second Gavin fires two shots, and the two poachers simultaneously suffer seizures. They slap at their necks and fall to the ground, their guns tumbling away from them.

I hover in place; I want to see how the girl reacts.

She doesn’t. She just stands above her handler. He is weakly reaching up to her. The leash is looped around his wrist, her neck. Her yellow-orange hair shields her face from me.