March in Country

by EE Knight

  He heard Casp grunt.

  Three wet strikes. Two quick, one loud and slow—a secret knock struck by a hatchet on a melon—and Casp fell. He looked like a toppled chess piece. The same neat collar, the same well-trimmed hair, facedown in front of a nowhere fill-up, all those hours in the gym punishing a punching bag obviated . . .

  “Run for your lives,” the Indian yelled to those inside, his stutter gone.

  He swung one leg up on the roof, yanked on his gun until the strap came free, then felt himself fall—pulled down.

  The ground hit him, hard.

  A flurry of legs and he rolled over. Still had the gun. Smelled blood, saw it leaking out of Casp.

  Horror in the lot. Red ran out of the driver’s compartment on the Transporter. Those fools . . .

  The Indian and Red were throwing bundles into the back of his Pooter. His Pooter! They climbed in, pressed the starter.

  Macon raised his gun, sighted. He’d blow their brains out and let a sanitation squad clean up the Pooter.

  PKEW! the gun rocked sideways in his hand. It had never done anything like that before in his range practice. He lowered it, tried to work the ejector but it wouldn’t slide.

  Misfire—

  No, the Indian had jammed something in the barrel. The gun’s mechanism was jammed. Shit—this had never happened to him in the field before, he’d had classroom training.

  The Pooter spun around in the parking lot. Macon rolled out of the way, but they weren’t heading for him . . . they pulled up alongside the Transporter and the girl slammed a bag into the wheel well.

  The bag hissed and smoked.

  The Pooter kicked up pebbles as they roared out of the Wayside.

  Panting, heart hammering as it had never beat before, Macon dropped the useless gun and rushed to the side of the truck. Expecting to be torn to shreds any second by the blast, he wrenched the charge free. Hurled the bag—odd shape for a demolition charge, and wet, must be some bathtub fertilizer mix in Kur-knows-what container. Had the presence of mind to hit the dirt between himself and the still-airborne explosive.

  It landed on the road. He could see it from beneath the Transporter. The bag had split on impact.

  The cigarette she’d stuck inside the bag had gone out. The sputtering hiss had been from a bottle of flavored soda that had sprung a leak as she crammed it against the wheel. It was the bag full of sandwiches he’d told the kid to gather.

  Angry, angrier than he’d ever been—who were these fuckers!— Macon climbed into the cab and shoved the dead idiots to the side. The radio was smashed. How had that dolt Casp not heard the Transporter crew being killed? Why had the Reapers remained inside? The passenger-side body was grinning at the secret joke of their demise, a Bicycle brand card still in his hand and a vast hole in his throat, as though someone had pried out his windpipe.

  He started the engine and pulled out after the Pooter. The rest of the Wayside occupants were fleeing to various compass points.

  The Transporter was built like a tank. Nothing short of a cannon could stop it. True Georgia Control craftsmanship, superb in its simplicity. Solid tires behind automatic blinds. Self-sealing fuel tank. Explosive-channeling armored plate.

  He drove as though demons had occupied the Pooter and he was an avenging angel. His charges pounded on the wall between the driver’s cabin and their compartment. They were probably going crazy from the blood smell.

  Still daylight. The Kurians had a hard time keeping connections with their avatars in daylight.

  He couldn’t wait to turn them loose on this pair. Regular Bonnie and Clyde.

  “Shut up back there!” he yelled.

  No radio, so the speaker system was voice only.

  They didn’t shut up back there. The banging increased.

  “I’m saving our lives. It’s still daylight.”

  Macon heard rivets pop. What the hell were they doing back there? Metal protested.

  “For Kur’s sake!” he shouted at the dimpled partition.

  At last the banging slackened. Maybe they finally figured out he was doing the driving and the communicator was dead.

  The Pooter headed north into wilderness, pushing through brush like a rampaging bull, suddenly lifted its tail. A great fallen tree filled the road, with thick woods to either side. The Pooter might still be able to push through, but only at a pace a jogging man could maintain.

  Macon slammed on the brakes as well, hard enough so he heard a thump in back. Well, the Reapers wouldn’t mind a few bumps. Especially not after he turned them loose on Bonnie and Clod.

  The pair rolled out of the transport. He saw heads bob briefly as they made their way to cover at the front.

  Macon felt very alone, now. In his first anger, he’d pursued without thinking about what would happen if he caught up to them. The sweat running down his back had gone cold and his mouth dry.

  He rolled down the window, heard nothing but the breeze rustling through leafy spring growth and the popping of hot metal from his engine.

  He found himself staring at the back of the transport. It took a moment for him to see what he was already looking at.

  Someone had looped a length of no-shit tow-chain around the handles, crisscrossing it several times. Those doors wouldn’t open from the inside without being torn off, and some puckering at the hinges on one side showed that the Reapers inside had been trying to do just that.

  Yes, the Control really knew how to build them. The air vent to the rear chamber was atop the vehicle, a little mushroomlike projection with a grid to keep out hand grenades. Even an expert shot with a good angle couldn’t use the vent to shoot into the rear.

  But the grid was stuffed with rags.

  Macon swooned for a moment, realizing the implications. He dropped to his hands and knees and looked under the Transporter.

  Someone had stuck a siphon hose in the Transporter’s exhaust and fed it into the air vent beneath the compartment. With the top corked, the deadly gasses had nothing to do but concentrate.

  The implications came—hard and fast. The sweat on his brow made itself felt at the same time—cold and greasy.

  Reapers used oxygen like everyone else. Carbon monoxide would build up and kill them. Easier than bullets.

  Especially with some fool in the driver’s seat redlining the engine.

  Just as well he couldn’t see the mess inside. Three Reapers, paler than they’d ever been. He could imagine the blue lines in their faces, more distinct than ever. He wondered what those yellow, slit-pupil eyes looked like in death.

  Macon understood how it had happened, but would the Green Prince? A new man on the team, a red-ribboned, gift-wrapped, perfumed fuckup like this, and the loss of three qualified lives to a pair of junkyard guerillas.

  He’d be lucky to get a job processing corpses for what was left of the Green Prince’s Reapers.

  For a moment, Macon considered putting the barrel of the gun under his chin and pulling the trigger.

  If you want to rise, do the difficult.

  It took a long time to grow a new Reaper to useful size and learn to survive on its own during breaks in contact with its master Kurian. Maybe ten years or so, though that was only a guess. No one he knew could say for certain. Only a select few were involved in that process. Maybe he could achieve something that would allow the Green Prince to control Western Kentucky with however many Reapers he had left. Couldn’t be more than nine or ten, he’d never heard of a Kurian who had more than a dozen or so.

  He cocked the revolver and came around the Transporter, firing as he advanced. He made it to the driver’s seat, put the transmission in reverse, and backed away from the Pooter.

  The figures rose, watching him. The redhead made an obscene gesture. The Indian stared. Maybe he mouthed something.

  John Macon pointed at them, then drew his finger across his throat. Silent promise.

  The Indian didn’t react.

  This isn’t over, zealots. If I have to crawl and beg,
sleep in the rain, and dine on raw rat, I’ll make it my mission in life to figure out who you two are. I’ll find your holes or your family or your clan and bring the full forest-burning heat of the Georgia Control down on you like the fist of an angry god. Before this summer’s over, I’ll have you both skinned and made into an awning, drink Long Islands out of your skulls, and wash my ass with your scalps.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Site Green, the Pennyroyal of Kentucky, February of the Fiftysixth year of the Kurian Order: the violent winter, the worst in living memory for even the outdoorsy locals, has ebbed at last. Nothing that might be called spring warms the sky, rather, it is a quiet between-season pause, like the lassitude between the break in a life-threatening fever and actual recovery.

  “Damn near as bad as ’76-’7,” would, in time, become the new standard for calamity of war or weather, depending on how the individual in question labeled it. Youngsters would later recall the onset of the winter blizzards followed hard by the terrible ravies virus outbreak that blossomed in screams and death. Flight, cold, hunger, fear—everything turned upside down in the deep snow.

  While the disease strain was the deadliest yet unleashed on mankind, it did not have nearly the calamitous effect of the original appearance, in that dreadful summer of 2022 when the Kurians first appeared. Then, ravies struck like something dreamed up in an apocalyptic horror movie with terrible effect. The saviors-turned-soulstealers appeared in the wake of a perfect storm of natural disaster and disease, offering aid and comfort that soon transitioned to enslavement and death once they had the half-starved, bewildered population properly under their control.

  But Kentucky of 2076 wasn’t the civilized world of 2022. From the Bluegrass to the Jackson Purchase, a network of clans who ranched Kurian-introduced legworms—and yes, some horses as well—toughened by years of squabbles with each other and bitter fighting against those who tried to incorporate them into the Kurian Order grazed their herds and preserved their independence. Their wary, well-armed neutrality made this limestone-hilled country the Switzerland of the eastern half of the United States. Yes, they sold the Kurians legworm meat and allowed a few towers along the main rail arteries, but if a Kurian ventured outside the urban centers with their Reapers, they lost enough avatars to make “freeranging” futile in the careful cost/benefit analysis of the Kurian Order.

  When Kentucky dropped its guarded neutrality briefly enough to allow rebel forces to cross its territory with the aid of a few clans hungry for real freedom, Kur unleashed its fury—first with the murderous Moondagger fanatics and, when that failed, with a virus designed to wipe the slate clean.

  There were losses, whole settlements and clans wiped out, but it was not the cleansing the Kurians had hoped for, especially in the rugged fastness of south-central Kentucky.

  However, much of the Western Coal Fields and the axe-handle of Kentucky’s Pennyroyal region were emptied as what was left of the locals fled to the protection of Kentucky’s military in the heartland or the tiny bastion of Southern Command south of Evansville.

  With frost and flurries still washing across the state on cold mornings, the Kurian Order seeks to take advantage of the emptiness. Nature abhors a vacuum, the unnature of the vampiric Kurian Order exploits one.

  The Georgia Control, a manufacturing center for eastern North America, has the audacity and the organization to swallow such a huge bite of territory. Why the Western Tennessee Kurians, a looser organization called the Nashville Concordance, agreed to support the endeavor that would add so much to the Control’s dominance in the region is a matter of some dispute. The various Kurian states are notorious for their plotting and backstabbing. Georgia either offered up a king’s ransom in auras or the Concordance Kurians believed that where their northern brethren had bled and failed, southerners would do no better and a weakened Georgia Control would be much to their advantage.

  There are other less likely guesses, of course, but those disputes are for the philosophers. Let us return to the beginning of the latest bid for Kentucky’s rich hills and bottoms.

  Signs that spring might be ready to appear are all around Central City, what used to be a little crossroads town near the old Green River Correctional Complex. Geese and ducks alight in the lakes and swamps northwest of town, drawn north by the warmth to their traditional nesting areas. Yellow coltsfoot blossoms—a local remedy for a lingering winter cough and sore throat—are beginning to open along the old roadsides, as if eager for the sun, though the roads are little better than broken-up streams of pavement filled with scrub growth and mudslide, a jeep trail at best.

  The abandoned prison complex now houses birds, bats, and a multitude of hornets’ nests at the top and everything from wild pigs to black bears on the bottom floors, with rats running between. For the Kurians, putting the stout concrete buildings in order and installing new glass and flooring can wait. The raccoons and owls will reign for a few weeks more everywhere but one office the engineers cleared in order to complete a survey of what needed to be done to restore the structure.

  The future Kurian tower will need holding cells and forced-labor housing.

  Noisy activity can be seen and heard around the clock at a construction site outside the defunct prison, on a patch of earth where the ground begins to rise between the prison and Central City. Two small signs identify it as SITE GREEN, one just off old state Route 277 and one off 602, both of which have been cleared of brush and tree growth by hungry-mouthed chippers for easier passage of equipment.

  Two wire-fenced camps, one for the uniformed soldiers of elite Nashville Concordance Guard on temporary lease to the Georgia Control and police of the Clarksville Border Troop and another for the worksite proper, snuggle side by side like a pair of pellet-chewing rabbits, both covered by towers, zeroed-in mortars and machine guns and ever-vigilant guarded gates. The military camp is thick with green tents. The construction fencing guards what is currently a deep hole and a few mounds of construction materials and piles of steel reinforcing rods, with a cement-mixing facility blistered out of the side like a growth.

  The race to fill the vacuum has begun. It would appear the Kurians were first off their marks.

  As the sun set at Site Green on, appropriately enough, Valentine’s Day, the other team joined the race. It seems an uneven contest. On the one side in this bit of empty are five companies of hired professional soldiers in the light butter color of Nashville khaki, their support staff and heavy weapons crews, police and reconnaissance auxiliaries, construction machinery, experts, technicians, strong-backed laborers, and a few cooks and cleaners and supervisors.

  On the other is a single man lying as though nested in a patch of hairy vetch, watching the camps turn off and in for the night. He’s dressed in a curious assortment of legworm leathers, insulating felt vest and gaiters, canvas trousers, and a nondescript green service jacket with rain hood missing its drawstring. One of the canny, nettle-scratched, and well-nigh uncatchable wild boars who root the nearby Green River marshes might recognize a kindred spirit if he came snout-to-nose with the man. Both know they’re a potential meal if they’re not careful, both have a dozen tricks to throw off trackers and hunters, or better yet, to avoid being observed in the first place. And both can be unbelievably fast and fierce when cornered.

  Scarred on face and missing an earlobe, weathered, and with a few strands of gray in his still-thick black hair, he has an uneven set to his jaw that can look humorous or thoughtful. At the moment you might say thoughtful, thanks to the slow-moving piece of fresh grass shoot working at the right side of his mouth the way a cow absently chews her cud. He’s not looking at the military camp. What’s behind that wire and passing in and out of the tents has long since been observed, estimated, and recorded in a battered pocket notebook.

  Instead he gazes at the mobile-homelike cluster of temporary housing for the most important members of the construction staff, especially the extra-wide one with the words SITE GREEN CONSTRUCTION SUPERVISOR V.
CHAMPERS stenciled next to the doorbell.

  They’re not wasting any time, Valentine thought. Maybe he’d wasted too much, first in Tennessee trying to trace the traffic from the Georgia Control to its terminus, then observing the construction site for two days, slowly devouring his precious supplies—mostly canned WHAM! legworm meat, uninteresting unless you liked faintly barbecued-flavor chewing exercises—he’d brought.

  After a long session of sassafrass tea-fueled negotiations with a shifty backwoods family of smuggled-goods dealers—he turned over the Pooter and its contents. He’d finally settled on a well-fitting pair of snake-proof military boots, two bottles of bonded bourbon, and a sum of Nashville cash he suspected was counterfeit. He kept only an Atlanta Youth Vanguard star-cluster leader key fob and a mobile file cabinet stuffed with papers and marked ASST. STAFF FACILITATOR MACON.

  He’d spent a lot of time reading, while watching the construction site and getting a feel for its rhythms.

  He waited, reading and watching, lying like a snake in the tall grass on an old saddle-sheepskin so dirty the mottled brown passed for camouflage. Dirty or not, it still protected his belly from the cold earth. Beside him, in a protective deerskin sheath, his Atlanta-built Type Three, 7.62mm, four feet of match-barrel battle rifle, waited like a sleeping friend.

  He hoped it would stay sheathed for the night.

  When his hard-running Wolves had first reported the construction and military traffic—one of the long-range patrols had cut across a road leading back to Clarksville recently used and partially cleared and sensibly followed it north to the source—he’d taken the matter up with Colonel Lambert. Their bloodied-but-still-training companies of ex-Quislings, sort of a “Foreign Legion” grudgingly acknowledged by Southern Command but at the string-knotted end of the supply chain, now had something much more ominous to face than a few ravies-addled psychopaths starving in the woods.

  The under-construction tower was like a sandglass being filled from the heavens above. Once it was up, the Kurians within would control everything within a fifty-mile or more radius.