Tale of The Thunderbolt

by E. E. Knight

  The man shrugged. "Don't know. They attached themselves outside San Juan. There are two or three more now."

  "Let me know if they try to catch up. I don't want one of them throwing a grenade into the explosives truck."

  Monte-Cristi joined him at the rear of the column. "We ran into some soldiers from one of the sugar plantations. The riders treed one of them."

  "Did they tell him the story and let him go?"

  "Yes, mon capitaine. He is running even now, with the story that we are marching on Santo Domingo. But implying that we are stronger than we are-"

  "We've got to play the role of... this reminds me of a lizard. I can't remember what it is called, but I know it lives in Australia. When it's threatened, these flaps of skin open up like an umbrella, and it opens its mouth and charges on its hind legs. It couldn't hurt anything larger than a bug if it tried, but the appearance of aggression makes a predator think twice," Valentine said. "Frilled lizard, that's what it's called," he added, his capacious memory coming to his aid. "We've got to look like we're charging, when we're really getting set to run."

  "You are a man of strange interests," Monte-Cristi said.

  "After I was orphaned, a teacher raised me," Valentine said. "I lived in his library. You were speaking of the militia. Where were the soldiers from?"

  "A sugar plantation. From what I hear, it is a big one. It is on this road ahead, we will reach it soon."

  "Good. I've heard of these plantations. I'd like to see one"

  Valentine had seen many work camps in his years traveling in the Kurian Zone. Yet the worst the KZ offered in the lands familiar to him was only a shadow of what he found on the riverbank of the Yaque del Sur.

  In the north, Kurian cruelty adhered to a certain logic. When it was time to kill, the Reapers usually performed the task in the dark of night, away from human eyes. Only certain auras were taken, and none wasted if possible, for infusions of vital aura were too valuable to whatever band of

  Kurians were in charge. Perhaps this green valley was only loosely controlled, or perhaps the island's people were fecund enough for auras to be in oversupply; whatever the reason, death worked overtime in this part of Santo Domingo.

  Dead, leaf-stripped palm trees along the road presented the first horrors. Valentine saw bodies, some nothing but rotting corpses beneath a mask of flies, tied to the trunks. Above the tormented figures bleached skulls were tucked into nests of pepper trees, threaded onto smaller branches. On some, the branches had grown through or around the skulls, swallowing them behind bark and bursting them asunder.

  Valentine locked eyes with one victim still alive, atop a magnificent body bleeding at the tight bonds around his chest; the man was crying, but had exhausted his tears. Flies clustered at the raw sores where the rope cut into him. Crows and vultures feasted on what was left of the man just to the left of him, and the one to the right had fallen apart, only the upper half of the skeletal structure remaining attached to the tree.

  To their credit, the Haitians did not wait for orders. The trucks stopped and men left their places in the column and rushed, knives in hand, to cut those still living free. Valentine kicked a bloated vulture out of the way and walked up the turn-off leading to the station. The vulture squawked and dragged its distended body to the culvert beside the road. It paused in the shade of a white-painted sign reading azucaErd Vargas. The Spanish word for "sugar" was peeling, but beneath the stenciled letters of Vargas's name were several layers of old primer.

  Valentine looked down the cane-flanked lane.

  A cluster of wooden buildings stood between two sets of high bamboo fence at the end of an unshaded gravel road. Valentine guessed them to be separate housing for the men and women of the plantation. Sugar cane stretched out to either side of the road, which was built up high enough to give a commanding view of the fields for miles. Cast aside at the gates of the establishment, like litter thrown along a highway, were more corpses long since rotted into a jumble of bones. Valentine saw a rat scuttle for cover among the bones.

  Ahn-Kha appeared at his arm, showing his uncanny sense of knowing when he was wanted.

  "I see a truck back there," Valentine said. "Get your Grogs together, and Post with his marines. Take whatever we need, animals, weapons, the truck if it will move, and some sugar. We're going to burn this place to the ground. Anyone carrying a gun or whip you shoot."

  Valentine turned on his heel and went to Post's battle-truck. Post was helping carry one of the plantation hands to shade.

  "Will, we're going to burn this place," Valentine said. He thought briefly of Duvalier and her various tales of arson in the KZ. She had been right. There were atrocities that only burning would cleanse. This was one of them. "I want it to look like it was never here, just a bare spot on the ground. Understand?"

  Post pressed a canteen into the hands of the newly freed man. He stood, jaw set, stinking blood and pus from the peon spattered on his shirtfront. "Yes, sir."

  Sailors and marines readied their weapons. Valentine chambered a round in his PPD and hopped up on the front bumper, holding on to the German logo on the grillework. The driver revved the engine, and turned from the line of torture-palms to the station road.

  The truck roared down the lane, fast enough to kick up dust. A figure or two appeared in the doorway of the main building, rifles in their hands. The principal building of the plantation was a two-story brick house encircled by a wide shaded veranda. Post loosed a burst from a machine gun, and the men ran. Sharp rifle cracks brought them down, the fall of their bodies kicking up puffs of dust from the gravel surrounding the main house.

  The truck braked before the house. Valentine released his grip, letting the final momentum of the aged Benz throw him forward. He landed nimbly and followed his gun barrel through the double doors. A man in a uniform similar to the ones he saw at San Juan stood at a glassless window, gaping at the men dismounting from the truck. He threw his hands forward, palms out, as if hoping to halt the men by body language.

  "Que?" he managed to get off, before Valentine cut him down with a burst from the PPD. The old, awful thrill ran through his body as he smelled the gunsmoke and the man's blood.

  Valentine walked into the kitchen and looked out the open back door. A woman in white rags ran, carrying a baby in her arms, a naked boy alongside her. He ignored her. He passed through an empty dining room and into an office. An electric fan whirred atop a paper-strewn desk. One window was shuttered and the other window stood open. Valentine looked around, a smashed gun cabinet showed an empty bracket between two shotguns. Whoever occupied the office hadn't had time to get the key. Or get his footwear, Valentine noted, seeing a set of high military-style boots by the door.

  Valentine moved away from the window, not wanting to give a rifleman an easy target. Outside he heard Grogs hooting amidst the tearing crash of wood splintering. He returned to the front veranda.

  Post had the Thunderbolt's marines backing up the Grogs as they stormed the barracks. The Haitians were at the gates of the worker compounds, breaking bamboo posts with crowbars and axes. The Thunderbolt's men stayed at the battle-truck, training their weapons on the unoccupied buildings. A rifle or two popped from the cane fields, but wherever the shots were aimed, they caused no damage.

  "See if there are any animals in the stables," he told Post, the sight of uniformed bodies lying here and there turning his bloodlust into revulsion. At the Kurian system. At himself.

  An hour later the plantation was in flames, and Valentine had almost a hundred more charges. Before burning it he had turned over the contents of the station house, barracks, and storerooms to them so they could carry off what they would. The problem was that they carried it off in the trail of his convoy.

  By the time they camped, still on the banks of the river flowing out of the mountains of the Cordillera Central, Valentine guessed those following his trucks, wagons, and animals to number in the hundreds. Some of the refugees drove pigs and goats, or pulled d
onkeys along with children or the aged perched on blanketed backs. He found Cercado warming some beans and rice on the battle-truck's radiator.

  "A good day," Cercado said, between spoonfuls.

  "We've picked up a lot of stragglers, though."

  "Who would blame them?"

  "Please, go among them. Find out what their plans are. Tell them ... tell them we are marching toward battle, and we need young men who would use machetes or guns."

  "You can't be serious, Captain. I doubt if one among them knows one end of a rifle from another. They'd be safer using it as a club."

  "Perhaps. If this keeps going on, by the time we get to Puerto Viejo, we'll have thousands of mem. It would be-"

  "Unfortunate," Cercado finished.

  "Agreed. Go among them, talk to them, see what they plan to do."

  Cercado spat. "That I can tell you already. They want to get away."

  "Let them know that's not an option. If they want to be free of the Kurians, they'll have to do it themselves. I'm not Moses. I can't bring the multitudes out of Egypt."

  The next day, the caravan crawling southwest along the old highway was outnumbered by those following it. The

  Santo Domingans never interfered with the soldiers, though Valentine expected that his men dropped back into their mass to distribute food and water, especially to the children. If they made it to the coast, it would be with an emptier belly and a tighter belt around it.

  If there was a bright side, it was that from a distance, his column would be mistaken for an army moving down the road, occupying miles of trail. With Monte-Cristi's riders and the Grogs leaving the column on excursions to set fire to roadside police stations, gather weapons and ammunition, and cut down telephone wires, the Kurians farther east might be convinced their border garrisons had collapsed, and an invading host was pouring out of Haiti. In the intervening days, he might have a chance to slip away in the confusion without further battle.

  Adding to this belief was the fact that the Kurians had already instituted a "scorched earth" policy as he moved east. They found fewer and fewer stations and plantations intact. Villages were burned and supplies destroyed or removed, adding to bis logistics worries. They were beyond the zone where Cercado's roadwatching network had stashed food, and while water was plentiful grain was running out for the horses, and food became short for the men.

  He reduced some of his problems by ordering the slaughter of a few broken-down pack animals when they camped that night, the second since leaving the armory at San Jose, sharing the ample meat out to the cooking pots of those trailing the convoy.

  Cercado joined Valentine and Ahn-Kha at their cooking-fire, appearing as he always did with his mixture of good news and bad. Their guide smoked a cigar, sending satisfied puffs skyward with his back against a palm.

  "The rumors you spread about an attack on Santo Domingo have come back to bite you, Captain Valentine," Cercado said. "Yes, it has scared the Kurians for now, but they are mustering forces west and east. These people have heard that the campaign against the island under Port-au-

  Prince has been called off, and their general is marching east to crush you. Even larger forces will come soon from the west."

  "How soon?" Valentine asked, grateful that Cercado was keeping his voice down.

  "Impossible to say. You must travel faster once you make the turn for the coast. They may move to anticipate you."

  Valentine looked into the fire. There had been delays almost from the first minute-how many were due to his faulty planning? How many to bad execution? His quick raid into the Kurian Zone, to test the quickwood weapons and get more arms for the Haitians, had succeeded in the first task: he had seen how effective the wood was with his own eyes. The second, while not being a total failure, had come far short of expectations. And now it looked as if the column would be swallowed entirely.

  "You've done all we asked superbly, Cercado. We're almost to the road to the sea. You and your family members should slip away now and go back to your mountains. Take whatever weapons you wish, even some of those from the Thunderbolt. It is the least we can do for you."

  "Captain, Santo Domingo has not seen the like of this in many years. Such a rising will come to a bad end, or a good one. Either way, it will be the subject for tales and songs that the peons of this island will tell long after I die, even should God grant me a life a hundred years long. What man, if he is a man, would not want to be a part of it? Even now, the poor peons on the road call you Revenant They say that a Reaper had you in its arms, but before it could bite you, you bit it, killing it. They say when you are wounded, you cut the body parts from your enemies and meld them with your own. Such tales are told of you-it curls the hair on my toes.

  "I will tell you something else. The smokes you saw on the horizon today, they are not just Jacques's riders-they are the peons fighting on their own, or the Whisperers burning and saving us the trouble of doing it. The countryside has risen. They've borne evil after evil too long. The men are sending their women and children to you for safety while they take to the hills."

  "I thought it odd that there were so many women among them, my David," Ahn-Kha said.

  "This has been a long time coming," Cercado continued, scratching his hairy potbelly and puffing away on the cigar. "The Domingan rulers left a hollow egg when they called away so many to fight against Kurian Haiti. It only took your footsteps to break the shell. Who knows, maybe in other parts of the island, as they gather men to crush you, other peons can take their chances. At the very least, the trade in sugar and rubber to their brothers in the north will be reduced for some time. Both require many men. If the Kurians kill those who rise, who will take their place in the cane fields and tapping rubber trees?"

  "We're already overdue at the coast," Valentine said. "We should have been there today. At this rate, we will be two more days on the road."

  "Do we dare travel at night?" Ahn-Kha said. "A final sprint, tonight and tomorrow, and the devils get the hind end?"

  "Devil take the hindmost is how we usually say it, old horse," Valentine corrected. He pictured the island in his mind, the various forces moving. "We'll get to the coast, all right."

  He rose from the fire and went to find Post.

  In the end, the Grogs' skill as pig-hunters saved the column. The stations along the road relied on pig flesh to feed their soldiers, and to a lesser extent the workers, and as Valentine's columns approached, they emptied their pigpens and drove the pigs into the brush. The Grogs had noses to rival Valentine's own, and they tracked the future chops and sidemeat to their hiding places. The dust-raising column developed a system in which the front end would take the meat and begin boiling it or roasting it, and by the time the tail of the column passed the fires, the meat was ready to be eaten at the next rest-halt by those hundreds upon hundreds bringing up the rear.

  Men, some of them armed, began to join the column from east, west, and north, telling tales of horsemen closing on the column from the barren stretches in the more arid regions of the island neighboring the well-watered river valley. More formations followed, bearing artillery and armed vehicles according to some of the tales. Valentine put Monte-Cristi in charge of adding the best-armed and healthiest of them to his own units, though there wasn't time for anything other than teaching them the system of moving for an hour, and then resting for ten minutes. Valentine was grateful for the additions; Post had gone pell-mell to the coast with the Thunderbolt's marines and sailors in the batde-truck to prepare for the column's arrival.

  By midday they turned south for the coast, moving on a smaller, less-used road. Valentine hoped that the change in direction would throw off any designs for the column's destruction.

  He managed to get his charges a few miles south of the old highway by moving on into the evening. When he finally called for a halt, the men dropped in their tracks under the bright Caribbean stars. Few of his soldiers rode; Valentine had turned space in the trucks over to the ill, weak, and pregnan
t of the column. Even so, there were those who turned off the road throughout the day to rest in the shade, and they would probably never catch up now. Smaller bands of Santo Domingan horsemen had appeared as it got dark atop the distant hilltops, marking his turn to the coast.

  He found Monte-Cristi in the center of a circle of his chieftans.

  "Ever fought a rear-guard action, Jacques?" Valentine asked.

  Cristi's eyes lit up. "My men have performed many an ambush. We run all the better afterwards, knowing we've hurt them."

  Valentine smelled the pork being roasted by Monte-Cristi's cook, his mouth watering, but he ignored his hunger. This was the final sprint, and there was too much to do.

  "Just hit them fast, and keep moving for the coast. I'm afraid they've guessed we've changed direction, and they might try to cut us off from the bay. We have to beat them to it."

  "We could, if we could empty the trucks of everything but the supplies: My men could march through the night."

  Valentine looked out at the sea of Santo Domingans sheltering behind the pickets. "A lot of these people can't. They joined us out of belief in some stories we spread."

  "You did not ask them to come. They must accept the fortunes of war. Not one in five of them will fit on your ship even if they do make it to the bay. They will be no worse off than if we had never come here. Otherwise, you will be asking my men to die for nothing."

  "You've seen how things are run here, Jacques. They've thrown in with us. We're their only chance."

  "They knew the risks when they ran away."

  "But that's just it, they haven't run away. They've run toward something, the chance at a free life. I would no more leave them behind than you'd leave those men you were stuck in the cave with."

  "I will tell you something, Captain. There were times- yes, there were many times, in that hole, after it was sealed, that I would have turned them all over to the Kurians for fresh air, sun, and a real meal. I... I prayed for the chance."

  Valentine made a show of fishing around in his bag for a strip of dried beef, so that he would not see the tears on Monte-Cristi's face. "The important thing is that when you had a real chance to give up, you didn't. How many of the legends on this island had the same doubts? Louverture, Pablo Duarte, I'm certain they had their moments when they questioned themselves." Valentine did not add that he had learned long ago that the only way he could live with himself was if he acted according to conscience, rather than orders or even military necessity. Usually his conscience and his duty asked the same things from him, but on the few occasions where their needs had diverged, duty lost.