March in Country

by EE Knight

  Putting a monkey wrench in the Kurian gears was a job for the whole brigade, or maybe just a few men. Valentine shaved that down to one, then reluctantly accepted the company of a wolf messenger and Alessa Duvalier as far as the outskirts of Central City.

  “One?” Lambert had asked, her usual brisk—some might say fussy, others attentive—manner shocked into immobility.

  “I’m not going to fight. I’ll go and have a talk with them,” Valentine said.

  That’s still what he planned to do, go and have a talk, armed with information obtained from Macon’s files. He checked the hilt of the fourteen-inch parang strapped to his thigh, the .45 automatic at his hip, and his quiet little silencer-threaded .22 tucked under his arm. The legworm pick was holding up some camouflage netting above his body.

  One worry. There was at least one Reaper in the camp, and a man who left a Reaper out of his calculations could easily find himself dead and strung up like a weasel on a gamekeeper’s gibbet.

  Alessa Duvalier, a redheaded tangle of living razor wire who’d trained him as a Cat almost a decade ago, lurked somewhere alongside the road leading to the gates, ready to hunt the hunter should the Reaper venture outside the gate. While it could leap even the nine-foot-high fencing around the military camp, Reapers didn’t like to exhibit their lethal prowess around their allies. It unsettled their underlings. They’d rather engage in quiet little murders in basements and abandoned barns.

  Getting to the construction housing would be easy enough. The trailers had nothing of value to protect. No valuable machine tools and construction equipment, no carefully guarded armories. Only a few hard hats and their laundry and some greasy baking foil.

  Night fell early, cloudy and cold, and he waited for the guard change, slowly chewing the last of his canned WHAM! to convince his stomach he’d eaten more than he actually had. He gave the fresh guards another two hours to become not-so-fresh, marked the location of the lone dog patrol, and wiggled with his rifle down to the construction camp fence.

  The smell of new spring green was everywhere. Some wild daffodils had opened, their yellow bluish in the dark. Their sweet aroma invigorated him.

  He made it to the garbage pit behind the construction camp and waited out the dog patrol.

  Thanks to the heavy equipment, they made a good job of it. The pit was ten full feet deep and much wider. Already it was littered with refuse, packaging, and bits from the construction already under way.

  Valentine lay at the lip, pretending he didn’t own a working nose.

  The stuff these Georgia Control workers tossed out! There was foil everywhere, smelling of a better grade of barbecue sauce than the WHAM! he’d consumed. In the United Free Republics, the make-do populace would never toss out practically brand-new foil. It would be washed, flattened, and folded by whichever kid had reuse chores that week. Once holed and useless, it would be added to the mass of insulation around an icebox or root cellar or compost pile, if it didn’t end up expanding the capacity of some old-timer’s still.

  The Control, one of the richest and best-organized Kurian Zones, encompassing as it did much of the old Carolinas, the civilized northern slice of Florida, and a good piece of Alabama and Tennessee besides, had resources the hardscrabble free territories couldn’t dream of. Ports for trade, overseas air, the rich coastal waters to feed their population—

  Then again, perhaps the Georgia Control had never fought a real war against determined humans choosing to die in battle instead of pierced by the tongues of the Kurian’s Reapers. They could bite off pieces of their neighbors, but they might prove just an oversized band of vicious riot police. Everyone had thought the Moondaggers invincible until they fought real troops with real weapons.

  The dog patrol passed, checking the overgrown ditches next to the road. Valentine saw a shape creeping behind, close to the brush, arms and legs splayed like a spider, wrists and ankles bent and fingers splayed in an unsettling manner

  Reaper. Keeping watch over the dog and its handler.

  This one scuttled more like a scorpion than in its usual biped locomotion, moving so it couldn’t be easily observed.

  Valentine pulled back into himself, imagining his consciousness a blue ball of energy he could shrink to a marble and place in his pocket. Reapers hunted mankind, seeking lifesign. It was an energy given off by sentient creatures in response to their size and mental development.

  The Reapers had the usual senses, of course. No one knew how good they were, though Valentine had some idea they lay somewhere between the handler and his dog. He’d taken in an infant Reaper after escaping Ohio, and his “son” was growing up near Saint Louis under the guidance of a woman who’d saved his life on Hispaniola.

  The Reaper paused, rotated its head like a security camera, stared briefly at the garbage pit. Valentine, quiescent as a mushroom, saw a family of raccoons, a hefty mother leading her offspring, approach the ramp to the pit.

  The Reaper cranked its head back to the forward position and scooted off after the dog and handler.

  Valentine ceased relaxing. At last he could have his talk.

  It was a homey little trailer, dark save for some light behind the bedroom blinds. The lock proved no more trouble than the polite gesture its manufacturer intended. One bedroom, a kitchen, and a cramped office in what he imagined was meant to be a spare bedroom at the other end. It smelled of pasta and vinegar salad dressing. The detritus on the counter showed everything but the bread and wine came out of a can, including the artichokes. There was a small bar buffet next to a comfortable chair with some ice melting in a cocktail shaker. Valentine picked up a yellow plastic ball and sniffed the lemon juice inside. That took the stench of garbage out of his nostrils.

  Animal noises, the galumphing sounds and keening cries of lovemaking, pulsed out of the bedroom. Whatever was going on in there was vigorous enough to make the living room’s main light fixture vibrate and one of the cheap kitchen cabinets swing open.

  Valentine marked a little bouquet of plastic flowers.

  These will have to do until the real ones appear in the spring, read the card.

  He removed his new boots and waited in the dark, leafing through a digest of Kurian Zone newspapers by the floodlight coming in through the blinds. No sense spoiling everyone’s fun.

  A few strangled cries, a gasp, then a few murmurs. A dark-haired, pleasantly plump woman appeared nude in the hallway before shutting the bathroom door on Valentine.

  He heard a shower curtain shut.

  Her lingering sweat smelled like sex and verbena with a little bay rum.

  Valentine picked up a plastic squeeze bottle of lemon juice on the bar and slipped into the bathroom. Moving fast—faster than an alert boxer could react, impossibly fast for a woman with soap in her eyes—he opened the shower curtain and grabbed the girl by her mouth and waist. She froze in shock.

  “It’s okay,” he said, forcing the plastic lemon into her mouth. “It’s okay.”

  “There’s only a twenty-gallon tank for the hot water, Carrie,” a male voice called from the bedroom as Valentine reached for the belt to a terrycloth robe.

  Valentine bound her wrists with a strip of plastic, temporary restraints carried by every Kurian security man. She’d be able to chew through them once she worked the robe belt out from around her head and the plastic lemon out of her mouth.

  “Don’t signal for help while I’m here,” Valentine whispered. “I’m not hurting anyone. I’m here to have a little chat with the construction supervisor.”

  He waved his brass ring under her eye. “I have powerful friends,” he whispered above the shower. “Be quiet, now.”

  He left her tied to the toilet plumbing.

  “What the hell,” Champers gasped, sitting bolt upright as Valentine strode in, pointing his .22.

  Champers seemed to Valentine more like an accountant than a construction hand. He had wizened eyes, a pale, angular body. He reached for some thick glasses.

  “Don�
�t be alarmed, Mr. Supervisor. I’m less your enemy than your bosses. Do you have any idea what your file says about you?”

  “Carrie,” Champers called.

  “She’s fine,” Valentine said. “I didn’t want her screaming out the window for help during our interview. It might help if you told her it’s okay.”

  “That remains to be proved. So, what did I do this time?” Champers said.

  Valentine sat down on an aluminum steamer trunk that smelled like mothballs. “I’ve no idea.”

  “Then why the midnight call? You make me think my time’s up.”

  “That’s not my department. I’m passing along some information I happened across. You’ve got below-acceptable evaluations in political activity and community service.”

  Champers swung his legs out of the bed, felt for slippers.

  “Want some coffee?” he asked. Valentine stiffened as Champers’s hand moved toward the bedside table, but he reached only for a pack of cigarettes and some matches.

  Valentine had to admire the man’s coolness, though he could still see a pulse going, fast and hard in Champers’s temple. “Let’s stay in here for the moment.”

  “Can I smoke?”

  “It’s your house.”

  “You with the Control?”

  Valentine set the gun down on the trunk next to his thigh. “No.”

  Champers waited.

  “Champers, you’re going to have to come up with a reason to abandon these works. Go fifty miles west toward the Mississippi, go fifty miles east toward Lexington. Just don’t build here.”

  “How do I—”

  “That’s not my problem. You’re an expert. Say the ground’s too soft for a tower of that height, or there’s malaria in the river. You have men on your construction crew with malaria? Show them one. Hell, I heard the Control’s mostly run by humans. Bypass this Kurian and take it up with the Control. Say Center City’s a no go.”

  “You must be a Kentuckian. The rebels. You don’t sound like one, you’re more northern.”

  Valentine shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. What does matter to me, very much, is that this tower never goes up. Now, we could stop it with a big fight, lots of explosives, God knows how many deaths. Or you could kill it with an engineering reason.”

  Champers cleaned his glasses with a corner of his sheet. “You really want this project stopped?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can kill it. Permanent as a big air strike. But I need some help, and I need to get away. With my men. Every damn one of us, or the deal’s off and you’ll have to kill me and try your luck with the Control garrison.”

  Valentine felt control of the conversation slipping away. He’d intended to come in, bluff and talk round a powerful Quisling, and instead, purely by accident, learned a name of an engineer of top-rated technical competence but doubtful loyalty to the Kurian Order. A strange man to put in charge of a tower. He was either a Kurian agent under very deep cover or truly a brilliant misfit.

  “Define help,” Valentine said, smelling a bottle of bay rum aftershave on the dresser.

  Champers adjusted his glasses. “You’re with the resistance, right? Look, me and my crew’s expendable. It’s a bunch of men and women on their last legs with the Control. Records like blotting paper, all of us. They’ve put us out here on the spear tip because if we get sheared off, no loss, we’re headed for the recycling bin anyway. Maybe once the tower’s finished, we’ll be the first official sacrifice. Just like the Control to save a tank of fuel bussing us back.”

  “I sat handcuffed in a recycling bin a couple years ago myself, Champers. I don’t like to see others tossed into a black van.”

  The engineer’s eyebrow went up. “The Control uses white.”

  “I didn’t say it was in the Control. Why would they get rid of you? You look pretty healthy, except for your eyesight.”

  “I’ve got a reputation as a bit of an unmindful. I skip the Church and community stuff.”

  “Unmindful?” Valentine asked. Strange phrase, it reminded him of Orwell’s doubleplus ungood. For a moment, he was back in Father Max’s leaky one-classroom school in a forgotten stretch of Minnesota lake country.

  “I don’t toe the line. I’ve also kept my people out of the can. Not the easiest thing to manage. The Kurians are always getting rid of ‘idle hands’ in the building trades. Idle meaning not pulling a fifteen-hour day, six days a week.”

  He seemed a little too eager for a guy who’d just made love to his woman and had a man barge in on him as he was considering a postcoital cigarette. That or he was a man who felt increasingly trapped, and finally saw a way out.

  Valentine hadn’t stayed alive in the Kurian Zone so long by trusting, but something about this man was sympatico.

  “Can you trust your woman?”

  “Carrie’s been my admin for six years. She’s made all the right paperwork disappear. Could have turned me in for a nice promotion hundreds of times.”

  “It’s your choice. Maybe we should all have that coffee and see about arranging a long-term retirement plan from the Control. We could certainly use some trained construction engineers in Kentucky.”

  Champers had an engineer’s mind. He adjusted to new factors quickly and settled on an efficient course of action. He’d argue for a new location for the tower’s foundation. If they listened and switched, it would mean a week’s delay or more. If they overrode him, he could arrange for an accident that would prove his original objection.

  Meanwhile, Valentine would organize a breakout for the misfit construction camp.

  With the woman named Carrie, he didn’t seem so much the tanned accountant, more the attentive boyfriend. She needed it. Perhaps it was the strain of being assaulted in the shower and tied up showing, but she seemed terrified by the idea.

  At the very least, Valentine decided, the works might be delayed until they could return with more forces. Then, if the Control put enough troops around Center City to meet an unknown threat, they’d have to weaken elsewhere. His companies or the Army of Kentucky could hit a weak spot then and really pour some fat into the fire.

  Carrie had a hundred questions, but Valentine wasn’t willing to answer any of them.

  “He’s trusting us on our end. We’ll have to trust him on his,” Champers said.

  They worked out a dead letter drop, using a coffeepot in the garbage dump, shook hands, and wished each other luck.

  “Honestly, how far can you set them back?” Valentine asked as he put his hand on the door.

  The accountant look came back into his eyes. “Six weeks. Eight if they’re careless with inspecting the heavy equipment after we’ve run.”

  Valentine wondered how much his battalion and the Army of Kentucky could accomplish in that time.

  Well, he was but a major. The higher-ups would have to decide what to do about the Georgia Control.

  He hurried away into the overcast night, around the garbage pit and under the wire fence, recovered rifle cradled in his arms. Just in case.

  The light went on in the trailer’s bedroom again. Maybe they were releasing nervous tension together.

  “More power to you, hard hat,” Valentine said, safe beyond the wire.

  Of course, safe, anywhere near the Kurian Zone, was a relative term. Valentine’s hair rose—a sure sign of a nearby Reaper.

  He didn’t know where he got the gift of sensing them. Perhaps he’d been born with it. Some of the other things he could do came from the Lifeweavers, humanity’s extraterrestrial allies against their Kurian cousins. His night vision, sense of smell, reflexes, healing—there were others who had been enhanced better than he. But he’d never met another Wolf, or Cat, or Bear who could tell by a cold feeling at the back of the head that a Reaper was nearby.

  It was up on the hill. Near where he was supposed to meet Duvalier.

  He risked a run, hoping the guards in the towers weren’t looking his way with night vision.

  Panting and dragging his bad leg
, he made it to the crest of the hill. The brush was lighter up here.

  Duvalier approached, hands shoved in the pockets of her big duster, smiling. Her sword staff was tucked under her arm like a swagger stick.

  He held up a clenched fist—danger!

  Was she drunk? Crazy? She ignored him, still shuffling forward as though trying to make as much noise in the soggy leaves as possible.

  A black figure exploded out of the trees, running for her.

  Too late, Duvalier turned.

  She screamed. Not her battle cry, half wildcat screech and half foxhunt yelp, this was a shriek of pure terror.

  The Reaper put long pale fingers around Duvalier’s arms. It lifted her. She kicked futilely at its kneecaps and crotch.

  “Hey!” Valentine broke cover, waving his arms, anything to get it off Duvalier. “You! Over here!”

  It opened its mouth. Duvalier managed to get a hand up to ward off the coming tongue—

  The Reaper jerked back as though kicked in the head by a Grog. It fell with her, one arm still gripping skin so deeply blood welled up like a pitchfork thrust into rain-soaked soil.

  Adrenals on fire in the small of his back he ran up, parang and .45 out, noise of the shots be damned, in time to see Duvalier sawing at the dead Reaper’s forearm tendons with her own camp utility knife. Released from the death grip, she stood up and turned to meet him.

  “You have your talk?” she panted, smiling.

  Seeing red and needing a fight, he resisted an impulse to slap her. “What was that, letting a Reaper grab you?”

  “Val, that was a hyperalert Reaper. I saw him come out of camp. He was feeling fine and ready for a night in the bush. His master must be somewhere nearby to have such a good connection. Hope he felt it wherever those squids keep their appetite. Just a sec—”

  She vomited up watery bile. “That’s better.”

  Duvalier had suffered for years from what she called a “delicate stomach.” A combination of bad water and worse food while wandering the Great Plains meant that anything stronger than rice and stewed chicken gave her indigestion.