by E. E. Knight
The Valentingle weakened and diffused, throbbing on and off in his head like a bulb on fading current.
He stepped into the hall.
Carnage was the only word for it. Bodies, some still dripping and twitching, lay in the hallway, or had been flung across gurneys. Crushed necks and heads mostly. Some bore wet blossoms on their shirts from punches that had caved in rib cages.
Valentine followed the pointy, bloody boot prints down the hall, found the corpse of the person that had saved him with gunfire. The teenage girl who'd checked him in at the desk was folded around her broken ArmaLite, her auburn hair bound up with a cheerful, polka-dot scrunchie. She had a hole at the base of her throat, paying for the insult of her .223 shells with coin drawn straight from the aorta.
Valentine shut her glassy eyes, turned her on her back, and straightened her, tenderly placed her heels together and her palms at her side, put her riven weapon on her chest, and covered her with a bedsheet from one of the gurneys.
He walked out the exit door at the end of the hall. The walk turned into a trot, which turned into a run, which turned into a sprint, ax held like a runner's baton in his left hand, pistol in his right.
The cool night air hit him like a slap, and like a slap, it brought him out of the moment's madness.
These weren't "wild" Reapers, sometimes sent into the Free Territory to brutalize and maul, little dandelion seeds of chaos drifting where instinct took them. These Reapers had gone through Nancy's quickly and methodically, trying to cram as much death into a given number of minutes as possible.
Which probably meant they had a long trip back. Perhaps as far as Tulsa?
Valentine's cat-sharp eyes picked out motion at the outbuildings. A Reaper, moving south, hopping from rooftop to rooftop as it tried to sense if any beings hid within.
He pulled back the hammer on his gun, then dropped it and the pickax on the ground. He sank so his knees hid them.
"Why?" he bawled. Not much acting required for this. He searched the low spring clouds. "Why us?" He covered his eyes, decided not to sob—there was such a thing as overdoing it.
The Reaper didn't even bother to cut back so it could approach him from behind. It approached a little off kilter, shifting this way and that, reaching too far with its lower limbs stepping toward ten and two rather than straight ahead.
Valentine smelled the cordite on it. He hoped this particular one had killed the girl. Dots of blood decorated its face, a sticky pox. Old Father Wolf was proved right again: Enough hate and you felt no fear, just nervous anticipation.
It planted itself in front of him.
"Some prayers are answered," it said, sibilants sliding out of its mouth like a snake's. "Look up and see."
Valentine knew better than to meet its eyes. He waited for the knees to bend and rolled sideways, shoved the gun almost into the folds of its robe, and fired.
Bullets wouldn't kill it, but the kinetic energy could sometimes stagger Reapers. Even with the powerful handgun cartridges slamming into it, it still reacted aggressively, swung at his head with a scooping motion that would have sent his skull spinning like a field goal kick.
Except Valentine was already behind it.
He buried the pick end of his hand ax into its upper back, where the nerve trunks gathered on their way to the armored brain case. He got lung instead, heard a sucking sound as flesh closed around the point.
It spun, jerking the handle of his pick out of his hands, and both opponents lurched off-balance. Its elbows clicked backward and its arms reversed themselves in a ghastly fashion as it sought the pick.
Valentine restored his equilibrium first, dropped, and sighted under the jawline. He put his remaining bullets into the underside of its chin.
The Reaper went mad, tore the pick free, and took off running, a blind flight with its hand held in front of it and the other holding its jaw on.
Valentine reloaded, retrieved his pickax, and trotted after it. It dived into the culvert beside the road and began to slither south at a pace he could just keep up with if he ran.
The Kurian clearly wanted his puppet back, even with a string or two cut. Had it been willing to sacrifice its avatar, it could have chased him down and killed him, hunting by heartbeat if nothing else. He paused in a tomato garden and calmed himself, tried to sense the emanations from the Reapers, caught a flicker off in the direction of the settlement garbage heap.
Valentine picked out a line of trees and used them as cover for an approach, hoping there wasn't a sniper or two guarding the gathering. He heard engines and movement, and risked a run.
He broke for the top of the low hill that kept the dump's sight and smell away from Nancy's, got up just in time to see a truck pulling a horse trailer, turning onto a brush-choked access road. A cut-down Humvee with a toothy brush cutter on the front and a winged Southern Command battle star painted on its side led it down the road.
You could pack a lot of Reapers in that trailer. An unpleasant surprise for the soldier who opened the door to check inside.
The vehicles, driving without lights—if they still worked— disappeared.
A roadblock would be helpful somewhere down that overgrown alley, but the false-flagged Hummer could just pull a disabled—
A blatting broke out from the garbage heap and Valentine saw a man in cammies with a scoped rifle slung across the handlebars of a dirt bike take off after the vehicles up the road. A cold wave passed over Valentine. Probably the sniper, tired and anxious after the operation and listening to the sounds of his buddies driving off, hadn't been searching the hill line or the trees in the direction of Nancy's through his night sight.
Had anyone in Nancy's called for help as the Reapers attacked?
* * * *
They arrived within a couple of hours, a thin string of cavalry on horseback, followed by more troops on mountain bikes, riding in a pair of lines on either side of the road. He watched them the way a rancher might watch a cattle drive—making guesses as to health, morale, and training from everything from the condition of their bootheels to how they shaved their sideburns. Someone in Southern Command knew his business. Valentine guessed this to be a garrison from one of the supply depots supporting operations west of Tulsa.
He sent Jules over to tell the captain in charge. They could radio to scouts around Tulsa. Even if the vehicles couldn't be intercepted, the scouts might be able to track them to whatever hidey-hole they sought.
The woman possessed an agile enough mind, and he could forgive a panic attack with a Reaper scratching at the door.
Valentine helped collect bodies. The Reapers had struck hard and fast, over a hundred deaths and a handful more wounded who would probably die in the coming hours from assorted traumas.
He mopped his brow after lifting one of the starred lawmen into an awning-draped wagon. He was happy to take part in the gory work; nothing quite took the spirit out of a man than having to pile the bodies of friends like cordwood, and as a stranger here he didn't know faces or names. The nasty business had to be taken care of both hastily and reverently.
Shadows on the road. Valentine looked up, saw the captain with a corporal and three soldiers trailing behind, Jules bringing up the rear, probably going inside to find Nancy. He lifted the camphor-dipped bandanna he kept over his face while moving bodies, and covered his features, wishing he'd grabbed a hat.
They turned for him. The hell?
Jules looked anxious. Was the captain going to get another paragraph added to his Q-file by bringing in an outlaw? Valentine went around to the other side of the cart and stuck a stiffened arm back under the awning.
"Excuse me, Mister," the captain said, a little Kansas twang in his voice. He smelled like horse sweat and service aftershave.
"Yes, Cap?" Valentine said.
"Major Valentine," a man with corporal stripes said, saluting. His hedgerow eyebrows had collected some road dust. "Sorry to disturb, m—
"Tonley, from the Razors. Corporal Tonley
now, by the look of it."
"Recognized your walk, sir. Saw you goin' up toward the buildings."
"Glad to see you again, and well. Or should I be?"
"No, Major," the captain cut in. "Nothing like that. I just wanted a chance to shake your hand."
Jules let out a deep breath.
"Glad it's that way." Valentine toweled off assorted flavors of filth and shook hands all around.
"Oh, you thought—," Tonley said.
"Hell no. Hell no, sir!" an unfamiliar private added. "Any sooner tries that, he'll have to walk back to the depot with his bike shoved up his ass."
"I beg your pardon," Valentine said. "Sooner?"
Tonley chuckled. "Oklahoma mounted. Mounted on bikes, that is. Get there sooner than the next guy and all that."
Tonley kept looking at his jaw as he explained the term and Valentine tapped the fracture point and said, "A nasty left hook." Unsaid was that the pugilist had been a Reaper, hunting him and Gail Post in the hills of Kentucky.
Valentine was invited to offer an opinion on tracking the Reaper-bearing vehicles, and the captain broke out his map. The party broke up within minutes, leaving Valentine with the feeling that he'd just got up from a long meal with old friends. Such was the nature of Southern Command's terrible, tasking comradeship.
"Sorry about that," Jules said. "I tried to tell them it was some big mistake, but they insisted on talking to you. They told me they just wanted to shake hands, but Duvalier said—"
"It turned out all right. But you needn't have worried, even if it hadn't. I would have gone quietly. They're Southern Command's boys."
"Meal break?"
"I won't feel like eating till tonight," Valentine said.
"Oh. Of course."
"Mind if I ask you something, though?"
She blanked her face, wary. "You bet."
"What was that about pregnancy last night? You're not expecting, are you?"
She glanced around, as though searching for an escape. "I was scared. I had a close call a little while ago."
"If I'd known you weren't on the pill," Valentine said. "Dumb chance to take last night."
"It's a chance, all right," she said.
"I'm used to riddles from the Lifeweavers, or in the Kurian Zone. But not from fellow Cats."
Her shoulders sagged. "Can we go somewhere and talk?"
* * * *
All the music and liveliness had vanished from the bar. Its door had been torn from the hinges. One of the bartender girls scrubbed a stain on the floor, and the other's eyes were downcast and red.
They had free Lemonclear, a sour concoction posing as lemonade, thanks to the soldiers. Southern Command's forces were departing, the bikers down the road and the horsemen cross-country. Before they'd left they'd put tabs of Lemonclear in five-gallon plastic jugs of the local water. The medicine both killed bacteria and water parasites and gave it a mild flavor.
They found a quiet corner out of hearing of the bartenders. Valentine skipped the polite talk. "Get it out. You'll feel better."
Jules' hands went to her kneecaps. "It's like this. You know we can't find the Lifeweavers, right?"
"I've heard rumors," Valentine said. No reason for her to know his mission.
"I feel like a creep. We should have just told you, but Ali said you'd have more fun the other way."
She expected a "Told me what?" so Valentine offered it.
"It's my way of, hopefully, becoming a Cat. I know the Lifeweavers do something to us, change our physical makeup somehow. They trigger a switch that's already inside us. That's the way it was explained to me, anyway."
"I don't think anyone really knows," Valentine said.
"Like blood from Bears, a transfusion heals stuff, practically makes a miracle. Or the way a couple of Wolves have sex and their baby turns out able to smell really well. Seems like if Southern Command wants more Hunters, it's up to the Hunters to make them."
Jesus, we're being bred like foxhounds, Valentine thought.
"There's also the Dulcimet effect," Jules said.
"I've never heard of that," Valentine said.
"This doc, Dulcimet, with the Miskatonic discovered it. He did this study on a Cat from the Yazoo Delta who got a couple of teenage girls pregnant. Women make better Cats, generally, just like men make better Bears. It turns out that when a woman is carrying a Hunter's baby, sometimes it has an effect on the mother, since she and the baby sort of exchange blood while she's carrying. That's the Dulcimet effect."
"So the idea is, I get you pregnant, maybe you turn Cat, and Southern Command gets another potential Hunter in nine months. What do they do with the baby?"
"Secret. They have to guard them from the Kurians."
Valentine sighed. At least he'd had a choice when he became a Wolf. Or had he?
"Anyway," she continued. "There are only a couple of male Cats. They've been looking for you for a while now, hoping that you'd get one of the volunteers pregnant."
She laid the tiniest extra stress on the word "volunteer."
"Was it real volunteering, or are you being a good soldier?" Valentine asked.
"Oh, it was real. Ali had me meet Stykes ... er, Major Styachowski. She painted quite a picture. Also, your rendezvous here was right for my cycle. They're keeping close track of that."
"I suppose they have to," Valentine said, feeling a bit like the butt of a cosmic joke.
"It's been almost a day. Maybe we should give it another go. The more sperm, the better."
They tried again. But Duvalier had been right: Knowing took a lot of the fun out of it.
* * * *
Duvalier returned two days later with Styachowski and another fit-looking young woman wearing Southern Command Labor Corps fatigues and teardrop sunglasses. The last served as driver for a post-'22 flatbed, a high-axled transport vehicle made out of the odds and ends of other heavy-duty diesels. They were bringing a new generator and another radio set to replace equipment smashed in the Reaper raid.
A footlocker strapped to the rear seat held the gear Valentine requested. Styachowski carried a waterproof file folder with maps and basic information about his destination.
Duvalier hopped down from the webbing holding the generator, where she'd ridden, using the straps as a combination hammock and harness. She looked like a hungry, road-weary hitchhiker, but her eyes were as bright as ever.
"Heard about the trouble," she said.
"Jules and I came through for the team," Valentine said. In other circumstances he would have added an exaggerated wink, but Nancy's was almost a ghost town now. Many of the survivors of the raid had fled east after the dead were buried in their common grave. Some of those buried had been decorated Quislings, killed in some final fit of pique from the almost-vanquished Kurians of Tulsa.
Styachowski slicked back her moon white hair, impatient.
Duvalier twirled her sword-stick on its leather thong. "They think they've got it tracked down to central Tulsa. Storm sewers maybe. I'm going to go poke around a little. Be nice to get at least one before it has a chance to bolt."
The Kurians were near-legendary escape artists.
"When are you heading west, Val?" Styachowski asked.
"When the right convoy comes through."
"Spare me a couple more days?" Sure.
"Val, this is Darlene," Styachowski said, introducing the slim-hipped, curly-haired driver. "She's been selected as a potential, an aspirant for either Wolf or Cat. We were hoping you could find time to take her into the field for a couple of days, up toward the Zone but not in it. Teach her a little. Then we'd like your opinion."
" 'Lina' for short," Darlene said.
Valentine wondered what kind of eyes waited behind the driver's sunglasses, and if she'd been counting the days since the beginning of her last menstrual cycle. "Glad to be of service. As a favor to you and Ali."
Chapter Five
Borders, Barters, and Bandits, April: Because the Free Territory and Kurian Z
one find their lands subject to change of ownership, and the occasional proposal to sit down and draw up peace plans meets only with ridicule, there are few well-defined borders. Even a widely acknowledged geographic obstacle such as the Mississippi River, serving as the unofficial eastern border of the UFR, is rather porous to penetration by small parties. David Valentine crossed it a number of times in the course of his duties as a Wolf or Cat.
In the flats of the high, dry country around the Oklahoma Panhandle there's no such divider. Only a depopulated strip, perhaps fifty miles wide, where farming settlements emptied over the summer of'2074, once the locals learned that the UFR would advance no farther.
Some say the dry, flat plains unsettled soldiers used to bushwhacking their enemies from hilltop and timber. Others insist that the Kurians of the old USA's Southwest, one of the better-organized and more cooperative collections of the New Order, saw the coming threat and launched a Grog-led counterattack that sent the Texas and Ozark natives tumbling back. Still others say Southern Command ran out of plan and logistics, growing fearful at the decidedly mixed results of the revolts between the Platte and Red rivers, which their assault was supposed to support.
Historical bickering aside, the region between the Kurian and UFR watch points is the home of rabbit, coyotes, and hawks, surveyed by high-flying Gargoyles during the day and aura-sensing Reapers at night. Remnants of the cash crops of the region—wheat, soy, sorghum, and barley—can still be found growing wild, sometimes grazed down by small herds of wild sheep and wily, testy goats.
The old interstate, shooting east-west through the flat with a bend here and there placed by engineers to keep motorists from growing hypnotized by the road, still sees a convoy every week or so. The Kurians allow the traffic so that their favored supporters might have luxuries brought in from far away, with the thrilling but harmless taint of black market goods, and the Free Territory needs the gear and medicines the inevitable smuggling compartments contain. The third winner in the arrangement is the road patrols, who inevitably take away a bottle of liquor or a carton of cigarettes as they carry out everything from fugitive searches to safety inspections on the road traffic.