March in Country

by EE Knight

  Valentine scanned the horizon three hundred sixty degrees, looking for something that might serve as a Kurian tower. “How did you kill it?”

  She stuck the blade of her camp knife into its jaws, pried them open a little wider. The Reaper’s stabbing tongue flopped sideways, like a broke-back snake smashed by a rock. With the jaws held open, Duvalier reached in and pulled out a blade about the size of a largish pen. It had a triangular base and narrowed to a fine point.

  “Nasty little pigsticker Chieftain rigged for me.” She rolled up her sleeve and showed the spring-loaded holder for a stiletto. “You have to hit a button. I’m glad he grabbed me by the upper arms instead of the wrists.”

  “I should think so,” Valentine said, good and mad.

  “Spit, the stick up your ass must like it there, I can hear it getting longer. I had it under control, Val. I’ve been hunting these dickless assholes longer than you. Stinkbait here thought I was easy pickins.”

  Valentine massaged his sore leg. “Thanks for the heart attack.”

  “Your heart! Ha. You’re a little soft between the ears, and I can’t speak for what’s between your legs, never having been with you in the Biblical sense, but I think that heart of yours is unharmed and untouched as ever. You’re all cold blood and hot steel, like those killer robots in the old whatchacallit we saw at the movie palace in New Orleans.”

  Valentine was examining the Reaper’s dress. It wore a tight-fitting jumpsuit that reminded him of the padding a baseball umpire wore over his chest. It was almost stylized. The monk’s robe look wasn’t popular in Atlanta, it seemed.

  “What’s next, Val?” Duvalier asked.

  “We strip your kill here. The material and the fangs will be worth something to the smugglers or the Kentuckians. Then we head back for Fort Seng and deliver the bad news. Georgia is on the march.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Odds and Sods: As it ages, any large institution develops quiet filtering areas where less useful or odd-fitting pieces wash up, to be either sluiced out of the prospector’s pan or picked out for some more useful activity. In a well-run organization, these pools are managed so that those in them perform activity that’s at least marginally useful.

  In a more sclerotic bureaucracy, those who find themselves in such filter pockets may moulder away quietly until retirement, in happy or unhappy obscurity depending on temperament, devoting most of their time and talent to making a more comfortable barnacle shell for themselves.

  Sometimes, out of a mixture of talent and boredom, an individual will energize the sluice.

  Fort Seng, just south of Evansville, Indiana, in the early days of what soon would be the Kentucky Free Alliance, was that sort of place. Fort Seng was remarkable in its organizational gravity. It served as a swamp not for one such organization, but for three.

  By designation, it was under control of Southern Command, the military arm of a welded-together federation of states resisting the Kurian Order called the United Free Republics. The UFR encompasses a region from Southern Missouri to Texas north of Houston, somewhat protected by the vastness and emptiness of the plains to the west and the Mississippi River to the east. Southern Command’s operations in Kentucky have received all the attention a butt-cheek boil would on a patient in the midst of coronary surgery.

  A fresh face and set of strategic outlooks in the form of LieutenantGeneral Martinez has a large staff evaluating all of Southern Command’s operations with an eye toward improving conditions, training, and chains of command. Martinez assumed overall command with a mandate from the newly elected president to prevent another in a series of expensive disasters that have dogged Southern Command since the mad dash through Texas at the birth of the UFR. Martinez has put Southern Command into a “defensive stance,” devoting his energies to consolidating what has already been won and giving his forces muchneeded time to refit and rest.

  Commander-in-Chief Martinez has a few career graveyards for those who don’t toe the new line. Fort Seng is one of them. It’s too far away to be within his new, more defensible map of “chords and arcs.” Withdrawal is not in the political cards, as the previous year’s trek across Kentucky in an attempt to establish a new freehold in the Appalachians was a partial success, ending with a victory outside Evansville that inspired much of Kentucky’s populace to rebel against the Kurians. With bodies of both Southern Command’s soldiers and their legworm-riding allies scattered across last-year’s battlefields, the United Free Republics aren’t yet ready to forget about the smouldering embers of Operation Javelin that had lit a flame of revolt across Kentucky.

  For the city of Evansville, a modest industrial town lately pried from the Kentucky Northwest Ordnance, Fort Seng is another sort of destination. The city has survived a dreadful shakeout. Kurian loyalists have fled elsewhere, and the factories and workshops fed by Ohio River traffic are short raw materials and components for their new duties in equipping Kentucky’s forces in the field. Half the population has been reduced to survivalist farming in little garden and parkland plots, fish hatcheries in polluted water diverted from the Ohio, or keeping chickens and pigs in abandoned housing and the rest are underemployed and growing poorer and more ragged by the day. Some have “called quits” and crossed the river seeking work around Fort Seng, where even that trickle of funds and supplies General Martinez allows his Kentucky garrison is enough to attract the desperate.

  Oddly enough, Southern Command scrip, the military currency disparaged throughout the United Free Republics and only accepted by most merchants at a highly disadvantageous exchange rate for macro-and microeconomic reasons that would make too lengthy a digression for our purposes, but which boil down to “can’t buy jack in the here and now” is the common currency.

  One might even say this stretch of Kentucky is a last chance for a few in the Kurian Zone as well. There are those who find escaping to Kentucky’s Jackson Purchase easier than the long trek to the United Free Republics or the dangerous run across the Great Lakes for the deep north woods outside the Kurian Windsor-Toronto-Montreal Belt. They’re valuable citizens, if they make it. Escaping across the Northwest Ordnance or through the military concentrations of the Nashville and Atlanta Kurians ensures that only the most careful, healthy, and intelligent make it. Once installed, they work hard to overcome the usual shortcomings of a Kurian Zone upbringing: near illiteracy, habits of blending in so as not to attract attention, and instinctive avoidance of authority figures.

  It’s also a destination for Quislings who worry their record supporting the Kurians will be used against them. Some are last-second “bolters” who’ve failed in some colossal manner and fear a visit from the Reapers. Others can no longer live with themselves as cogs in the dreadful system. Service with Southern Command’s odd-lot battalion at Fort Seng for six years promises a new identity with an honorable military record. Those with grievous sins they wish to escape, forget, or expunge show up at Fort Seng, give their assumed name, take the oath, and are escorted to the showers and supply depots.

  A few who support the Kurian Order even wash up somewhere between Evansville and Fort Seng. Kentucky was long a region of wellarmed neutrality and there are those who would have it return to that condition. They would bring Kentucky back with tactics drawn from Shakespeare: “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.” A missionary who ran a little one-man doughnut shop led the way. He had quickly become a fixture, not just because his doughnuts were tasty, but because of his zeal and friendliness with all who crossed his path. A few others have followed in his foot-steps, unarmed and professing only peaceful intent, including a doctor and a dentist and a couple of teachers who provide services for little or no charge but pay for their necessities in silver and gold. Their offices are littered with Kurian tracts, their professional chatter full of careful probes and discreet offers. Not quite enough have arrived so that there’s a “Kurian Quarter” in “Desperation Row” as the little strip outside Fort Seng i
s now called, but enough so that they too have a place in the remarkable collection gravitating to this corner of Vampire Earth.

  Every time Valentine left Fort Seng, even for a few nights, the camp changed by the time he returned.

  This time his return was from the south, mounted on a legworm, a sort of giant caterpillar introduced to the area by the Kurian allies in 2022. Atop the worm’s back, riding at about the height of an old tractor-trailer driver and moving at a steady pace a little slower than a dog trotted—Valentine idly calculated it at nine miles per hour by dropping a weighted line and pacing the worm’s back in a fashion not dissimilar from the way old sailing ships measured their speed—he could stretch out, sleep even, while the worm’s driver prodded it along with pokes from a long hook.

  The young worm and its driver were on loan from the Gunslinger Clan. The Kentucky legworm raisers were the closest allies of Southern Command’s forces locally. He’d travelled with them, fought alongside them, saw victory and defeat beside them. They contributed a “troop” of legworm cavalry to support their allies at the base, with a few more available in a pinch. For now, they had five legworms providing slow, but all-terrain, transport and cargo haulage, and were training the fort’s garrison to handle a dozen more. Southern Command’s forces, which up to the Javelin operation had been only on the receiving end of legworm-mounted attacks, were learning fast—at least in Kentucky.

  Back across the Mississippi, any species that had “appeared” since 2022 was considered suspect at the very least.

  It was Colonel Lambert’s doing of course. She liked her camp the way she liked her desk: neat, organized, everything in its place. Valentine had never actually seen her pencil drawer, but he suspected all her leads were sharp and facing the same direction.

  Outside Fort Seng, there was a new sign up at the vast New Universal Church relief tent:

  NO FOOD TODAY

  SUPPLIES INTERCEPTED

  Valentine had heard that once the sign claimed Southern Command had intercepted and confiscated their shipment. A few of the Bears visited the tent, tore it down, and bounced the churchmen on an improvised trampoline made out of the tent, explaining that if Southern Command had intercepted a food shipment, they’d be eating it.

  Since being bounced almost high enough to see the Ohio River over the hills and trees, the missionaries had cut down on the specificity of their claims.

  Always-hungry Bears had great noses for food.

  He dismounted long enough to clear the legworm driver and Duvalier—a blanket-covered carbuncle on the mossy back of the worm—into the fort.

  A block-and-log guardhouse stood at the gate now, along with an unmanned machine gun position. They were positioned well to cover each other. Valentine saw a couple of doughnuts resting on a sill, an easy reach through the window of the guardhouse.

  “Crumbs on your uniform, son,” he told the guard.

  “Sorry, Major.” The private brushed the crumbs off.

  “Let’s watch the eating on sentry duty. We don’t want our friends across the highway thinking we’re slack.” He forced a smile.

  Valentine scowled at the corporal standing at the guardhouse door. He didn’t like this kind of petty officiousness, especially when he was riding into camp dirty, unshaven, and dressed in a collection of odds and ends that barely qualified as guerilla-wear. But a quiet word and a glare or two now were better than going to the man’s captain, who’d roll it downhill to a lieutenant or sergeant, and the poor kid would hear about it tonight or the next day, with all that added momentum.

  Once through the woods and to the fort proper, Valentine thanked the worm driver and checked off on a list of supplies he’d carry back to their Gunslinger allies. He woke Duvalier and sent her to the showers, then walked up to the great house that served as Fort Seng’s impressive headquarters.

  He noted new gravel on the athletic field and some log bleachers. Baseball and basketball were the traditional sports of Southern Command, but for some reason the men of Fort Seng loved kicking around soccer balls outside and Ping-Pong indoors. It had probably started because that was the only athletic gear at hand. They’d added some rule modifications of their own that brought it closer to rugby or football. Exciting stuff to watch, but Valentine hadn’t had the chance to do much but goaltend during practices yet.

  There were some new vegetable beds in on the mansion grounds as well. Time was, when a sergeant wanted to drill his platoon, he’d take them to “the field” or “the hill.” There they’d crawl, run, walk, squat, and roll until he or she could smell the sweat. Colonel Lambert changed that. She preferred exercising the troops under her care by having them build or haul or dig, and if the fort didn’t need gravel or lumber or rubble cleared away that week, well, the city of Evansville did.

  Valentine approved—for the most part. He voiced a concern that Evansville had to look on their allies at Fort Seng as soldiers first, and a handy source of disciplined labor a long second. Evansville had to organize itself, the day might come when Lambert’s battalion would move out and be gone for a year.

  No new faces at headquarters. Lambert was off at the big guns that watched over the river, so he reported to her acting adjutant, a former Quisling he’d trained up for the long march across Kentucky last year. She’d been promoted to captain and, next to his old top sergeant, Nilay Patel, was probably the best officer at Fort Seng. Captain Ediyak had proven her worth since day one as a Southern Command recruit, and Valentine was pleased to see her under Lambert’s wing.

  Through the doorway, Valentine saw an unfamiliar man wearing a major’s cluster sitting in Lambert’s office reading personnel files. He had the hard, glitzy look of a headquarters type, like polished chrome. He needed reading glasses but didn’t put them on his nose. Instead he lounged there with one bow in his mouth, nibbling thoughtfully as he read through the lenses. Ediyak didn’t mention him so Valentine didn’t ask.

  “Once you’re cleaned up, there are a couple new faces you need to meet,” Ediyak said. She always reminded Valentine of the models in the old magazines, big eyed, delicate, and thin. He knew the delicacy was only skin-deep. She was as strong as any woman at Fort Seng, just small boned from a youth on short rations. Her family had been nobodies in the Kurian Deep South, so as a little girl she probably hadn’t seen a ham from one Thanksgiving to the next.

  “Need, not want?” Valentine poured himself a glass of water from her office carafe—a nice piece of silver, the old mansion was full of flashy gewgaws its former Quisling owner had collected—and sat down. Ediyak knew him well enough to know that when he was off his feet protocols were relaxed and she could speak freely.

  “Depends. We’ve had a couple more Bears come in. That makes five this month, I believe. These last two were busted out of their outfit for talking monkey about Martinez and his new ‘defensive stance.’ Or maybe they want to be where there’s still fighting. One of them said something about your old unit, the Razorbacks.”

  Talking monkey was Southern Command slang for throwing feces, to put it politely. The Razorbacks were an ad hoc unit formed on the march into Texas, and had been disbanded a few years back after nearly being destroyed in the siege of Dallas.

  “I never say no to Bears. Gamecock is good with discipline problems. We could use them. There’s a Kurian tower being built about sixty miles southeast of here, more or less.”

  “The colonel will need to hear about that.”

  Valentine nodded.

  “There’s also someone the Miskatonic sent. Between us, I think Southern Command didn’t know what to do with her, so she got shipped out here. She claims you’re the only one that can appreciate her ideas.”

  Valentine noticed the major in the next room had been looking at the same page for the last minute without moving his eyes.

  If headquarters wanted to spy, let them. Their officer would return and report that yes, Fort Seng is woefully short of Southern Command’s Interior Utility Gray paint and individual fi
eld toilet paper packs.

  “A nut?”

  Ediyak crinkled her nose and mouth into an expression half pucker, half smile. “More like a zookeeper—well, you’ll just have to meet her. She’s set up above the stables, so she can be near her little menagerie. I’d introduce you, but I’ve got the desk.”

  “I’ll try and find her on my own.”

  “Ask for Victoria Pellwell. Tall. Hard to miss.”

  “Pellwell?”

  “Victoria Pellwell.”

  “Sounds like a heroine in a Gothic romance,” Valentine said. “Ailing father.”

  “Lots of windswept moors and a cozy hayloft.”

  He felt a gentle pang. He’d touched his first woman in a hayloft. Molly Carlson, who’d grown up in an agricultural Kurian Zone in Wisconsin.

  “Don’t forget the tin bathtub that the maid has to fill with a kettle.” Valentine had baths on the mind. He disliked being dirty; personally, and professionally he didn’t like wandering headquarters looking like roadkill, so he made his excuses to Ediyak and headed off to the big basement bathroom and sauna next to what had presumably once been an exercise room. There he used one of the luxurious, multihead showers to soap his collection of Tennessee and Kentucky dirt off and changed into clean fatigues. He handed his newly acquired boots to Bee for polishing.

  Bee was a “gray” Grog, a member of a muscular, thick-skinned fighting race of near-human intelligence. Or maybe they were as smart as humans, with a different way of presenting and learning. Grogs possessed good instincts for machinery and weapons, tools and plants and animals, but they fell apart when put in front of a sketch board where two-dimensional icons represented the solid objects they understood. He’d known her previous companion, a stinky bounty hunter named Price, and had rescued her from a circus menagerie years later. She’d gained a few scars and lost vision in one eye serving him. Bee fretted when he was gone too long.