March in Country

by EE Knight

  The driver looked over his shoulder.

  Valentine showed him the grenade ring.

  The driver got one arm out, then the explosion launched him like a champagne cork.

  Valentine found himself atop a careening armored car. It bounced off a tree root.

  Duvalier was braking, hard.

  The world tipped on its side and Valentine felt momentarily weightless, before he landed, painfully and like tricky old Br’er Rabbit, in a thorny tangle.

  When he regained his bearings he felt the warm sensation that meant the pain would come in a minute or two. He cautiously moved each limb and looked down at his body. He felt like Scarecrow after the monkeys had finished tearing the straw out of him.

  Duvalier appeared, smiled through a mask of drying blood, and held out a hand.

  “I think we’re each down one of our lives,” she said. She helped him to his feet.

  They sure build these things tough, Valentine thought. Typical Control quality.

  They found the driver of the first armored car, bleeding and unconscious. She drew her skinning knife.

  “No. We can take him with us as a prisoner. He’s good, and he’s lucky. I’ve never seen someone blown out of a vehicle like that still living.

  They spent ten minutes working on the driver’s injuries—abrasions and contusions, luckily for him—and secured him with a plastic restraint. Then they took a look at the vehicles.

  He learned why they were hustling back to the camp so quickly to tell their news. The vehicle on its side was rigged for long-range radio. The antenna, designed to lie flat atop the armored car, had been torn away somewhere or other.

  “The base still doesn’t know about us,” Valentine said.

  “Unless there’s a Reaper prowling around,” Duvalier said. “I checked out the interior of ours. Either the previous users had really big feet or the car carried a Reaper recently. Long, pointed boots with the climbing toe.”

  The Wolves, pounding down the road in a double line, caught up to them.

  “Lieutenant Carlson says a couple of platoons left camp in trucks and a command car, sir,” the sergeant in charge reported.

  The dead driver from Valentine’s car looked clownish now, in that big white hat and gold-rimmed aviator glasses. Like Carlson, he was black. Valentine had an idea.

  With tow cables, a stout tree, and some judicious driving by one of the Wolves, they managed to right the tipped armored car. They drove back to headquarters at a much more cautious pace, with Valentine and Duvalier tucked inside the front one, tending to each other’s scrapes and cuts.

  “Lieutenant,” Valentine said, upon their return. “Do me a favor. See if that hat fits.” He handed Carlson the hat and sunglasses.

  “The glasses are prescription, but I can manage,” Carlson said.

  Valentine took a cautious look at the camp. “They’re expecting these armored cars, right? Let’s have ’em drive right up to the gate.”

  They had hidden the damage somewhat by hanging packs and ponchos over the bullet holes. It looked sloppy, but if the plan went right the Georgia Control sergeants would have graver concerns than chewing Frat out about the gear exposed to roadside growth.

  Valentine filled both armored cars with Wolves, and distributed the grenades.

  Carlson drove up to the gate, and in an inspired move, sounded the Klaxon and flashed his lights. He took off his hat and waved it.

  The Wolves, before opening fire, whipped off their Georgia Control helmets and jackets. Valentine himself had done plenty of damage wearing the enemies’ uniform, but Carlson had told his platoon differently.

  The armored cars tore through the camp’s temporary structures, pouring fire into machine gun positions and the camp’s watchtower. Grenades exploded all around like fireworks, adding a sharper krack! echo to the popping noise of the machine guns.

  Valentine surveyed the action with his binoculars, hurting all over. He served as Bee’s spotter as she employed her heavy, big-game rifle. One of Fort Seng’s armorers, remembering how she probably saved his life by taking down a plane as it started a strafing run, did her loads by hand, testing each production run himself with her rifle on the camp’s range. She eliminated a machine gun crew with three quick shots before they could ready their weapon.

  She didn’t even have two good eyes. Remarkable shooting.

  With the wheeling armored cars causing chaos within, Valentine watched the Wolves hit the wire like a tornado. They tore through the posts and wire like a scythe through dry straw.

  The shooting died off to a trickle, like the clamor of a noisy party winding down as the guests left.

  “Carlson signals he’s starting the mop-up,” the coms tech said. “Fourteen prisoners so far.”

  Champers’s engineers, an assortment of men and women, mostly over forty-five, Valentine suspected, seemed a strong, capable lot. They and their rescuers eyed each other, misfit to misfit.

  Duvalier had gone in to the engineer’s camp before the Wolves hit to poke around, and found a frightened, confused Reaper snarling in the explosives dugout. She quickly locked it within, and the engineers parked a bulldozer across the door. Campers kept everyone well away from the dugout.

  “His master’s probably running for Tennessee as hard as he can,” Valentine said.

  “Be nice if we could take it alive,” Pellwell said. “The Miskatonic has wanted a living Reaper forever. Especially one bred to be controlled by a Kurian.”

  “You’re welcome to try, shanks,” Duvalier said.

  Sooner or later it would get hungry and dig its way out. Champers volunteered to try setting off the explosives, but Valentine declined.

  “The Control will move back into Site Green sooner or later,” Valentine said. “Having a wild, hungry Reaper lurking in the area will add some excitement to their return.”

  Valentine gave the usual speech to the military prisoners, promising them freedom. Anyone trusted with a gun in the Kurian Zone had probably left a hostage or two behind.

  “You know what’s in those cells, Major,” Frat said. “Human litter. Petty criminals, terminally ill. They’ll slow us up.”

  Valentine thought back on his own days as a Wolf lieutenant, when he’d been upbraided for what his old captain called “rounding up strays.” More trouble than they’re worth, Valentine.

  “Denial of resources, Lieutenant,” Valentine said. “The Kurian wants them. That’s enough of a reason for us to try to take them away.”

  “Perhaps,” Major Grace began, “perhaps we could do our part by just setting them loose.”

  “For the Reapers to hunt down?”

  “If it keeps them off us,” Grace said.

  “You ever heard the expression ‘Whoever saves one life, saves a world entire’?” Valentine asked.

  “I’m not sure. Is that some maxim of that Quisling churchman?”

  “Older than that. How about ‘Go fuck yourself’?”

  “That’s insubordination!”

  “I was only asking if you’d heard it,” Valentine said.

  Valentine noticed lights on in the old prison. Had the Kurian Lord already begun gathering an aura supply?

  He might even have slipped in, but finding him, let alone killing him, in such a large complex would be difficult without surrounding the prison with flamethrowers and having the men burn their way to the center.

  For all he knew, there wasn’t anyone in there except a couple of Control soldiers cleaning out the animal and plant infestations that had no doubt built up over the years.

  “Leave it alone, Val,” Duvalier said. “Look at that place. I doubt anyone’s in there who isn’t fixing a toilet. It would take us two hours, probably, to get there, check the whole place out, and get back. Plus, probably more killing. Now me, I’d go there just to knife a sentry and set fire to it, but I know you’d want to bring out some one-legged senior citizen who lost the last round of musical chairs at the post office.”

  “Maybe I
’ll go over and peek in a few windows,” Valentine said quietly. “Or not,” he said, looking at his radioman, who was working a scrambler radio taken from the armored car that should be able to pick up Georgia Control communications.

  “Major Valentine, may I—” Pellwell said.

  “Cool your engine, college girl,” Duvalier said.

  Pellwell drew herself up and ignored the interruption. “You could let me send in the ratbits. They could cover that building in half an hour. If it’s in as bad a shape as it looks, they’d have no problem getting in or getting around.”

  Valentine looked at her charges. They’d found a greasy wrapper caught in a bush, probably blown from the construction landfill, and were sniffing stains.

  One looked up at Pellwell and chittered.

  “Yes, food soon.”

  “Do they understand what a uniform is?”

  “They know how to tell an armed man from an unarmed one.”

  “You send them into that building, and if they find any prisoners and count them accurately, I’ll buy them a steak dinner. Or whatever their favorite treat is.”

  She squatted, looking like a grasshopper thanks to her long limbs, and lifted up the biggest ratbit, the one Valentine was calling Patches. She pointed. “That building. Count men. Count soldiers. Very quiet. No steal. No wreck.”

  Valentine heard it yeek back. She handed out a piece of bacon to each from one of her big leg pouches. The ratbits stuffed them into cheek pouches as Patches chittered at the others.

  They bounced off on their oversized hind legs, making Valentine think of a kangaroo he’d seen on a TV documentary in his time with the Coastal Marines.

  Pellwell looked anxiously at the sloping ground between the hill and the old prison.

  “Worried they’ll screw up?” Duvalier asked.

  “Not so much that,” she said, blinking fast. “They know what to do. Before, it was all play in old warehouses and apartments and school offices. One of them gets caught down there, it isn’t just a loud no and a spell in isolation. They’ll get stomped on and scraped out into the garbage.”

  Valentine had his own anxieties. He’d heard nothing from Gamecock’s Bears.

  The only blemish on the operation was that they couldn’t destroy the foundation of the Kurian tower. No one wanted to venture in to get the explosives and face the fangs of that locked-up, anxious Reaper.

  Valentine nearly had the prisoners organized for the ride back. Thanks to the armored cars, some utility trucks, and a personnel transport bus, everyone would be able to ride.

  As dawn came up, Valentine thought he heard gunfire in the distance, but he couldn’t be sure. His ears sometimes played tricks on him when he pressed them.

  A Bear messenger rumbled in on a captured motorcycle. He reported that Gamecock’s radio had “crapped out” before they even hit the crossroads blockhouse, and the Bears had successfully executed their ambush. Gamecock would pursue the Georgia Control Company south for an hour or so to “keep up the skeer” and then turn back north and head for the rendezvous.

  The Gunslingers came in on their legworms and picked through the camp. Valentine was giving them advice on keeping well clear of the explosives dump when Pellwell returned. She gave him a salute.

  “You don’t have to do that, you’re a civilian.”

  “Oh, sorry ... I was excited. Major Valentine, my guys are back from the prison. They searched the whole thing. They counted three soldiers there, four other men total, one other.”

  “One other what?”

  “They’re not sure. Big like her, they say.”

  “Like Bee?” Valentine asked. “You sure they didn’t mean scared of them or something like that, but ‘big’?”

  “I think they might mean even bigger.”

  “You think they mean a legworm? What’s bigger than Bee?” Frat asked.

  “We’re going down there to find out,” Valentine said.

  As the Wolves came in the front the guards ran out the back. Valentine decided to let them go. They were ordinary security types, by the look of them, not soldiers. None ran off with anything larger than a pistol. They wouldn’t even give the Gunslingers any trouble if they decided to turn and fight.

  The prison had only one wing cleared for human habitation, the rest still had much of its moldering infestation, with thick slimes growing in all the drainage fixtures, revived by the recently repaired water system.

  A few of the cells were occupied with backwoods Kentucky folk, probably rounded up by patrols while hunting for their families. Valentine felt a wash of achievement. There was nothing like the look on a man’s face when he stepped out of a cage.

  The “other” was not in a cell. In fact, he startled Bee into an excited yelp as he emerged from a dank stairwell.

  Seven feet tall without even drawing himself up to his full height. Golden faun-colored fur, darker on the back and lighter toward the belly and beneath his manhole-cover pectorals. Well-scarred, crudely stitched, missing a piece of ear, with fur patchy over his wounds and fresh blood, sticky and spiky, about his muzzle.

  He carried a short aluminum pole threaded to take a variety of tools. In this case, the handle was capped by a small shovel blade, bright at the edges where it had been recently sharpened and so bloody and covered in dripping shards of viscera it looked as though it had been used to stir a vat of grue.

  “Well, my David,” Ahn-Kha said. “This saves much explaining in both directions. Could you offer me a detachment? A few skulkers fled into the woods, and there may be one or two more in the basements. I might need some assistance in rounding them up.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Cutthroat’s Room, Fort Seng: It would appear that once Valentine’s bedroom suite in the old mansion house belonged to someone named Cuthbert. THE CUTHBERT ROOM is carved in elegant letters on the door lintel.

  Southern Command’s soldiers, being who they are, defaced the beautiful woodwork in such a way that it now reads THE CUTTHROAT ROOM.

  Many of Fort Seng’s soldiers are better at fighting than spelling, it seems.

  His quarters are sparse but not quite Spartan. Military billets were the only home he’d known since leaving the Northwoods at seventeen. He’s done what he can to make this unusually lavish room his own.

  Apart from the gun rack with his ready weapons, that mean-looking type three Atlanta Gunworks battle rifle and an unusually elegant 1911 Model .45, plus his blade and pick, legworm leathers, issue helmet, and combat harness.

  A neat little .22 isn’t visible, just as it is when he wears it. But it’s in easy reach between the mattress and box spring.

  Sketchwork covers the walls, picturesque ruins of old public buildings and burned brick structures around Evansville and Owensboro with new growth in the windows and feral cats lounging. They’re not his art, they’re the work of his Bear chief, the Carolinian named Gamecock.

  There are also photos. A surprising number decorate the room on a byway of a big bulletin board salvaged from some office. To those who do not know him well, the little collection of pictures hung in protective plastic baggies—the experienced might recognize the plastic polymer as Ordnance ID sleeves—might seem bewildering. It’s hard to gauge who those depicted are and how old Valentine was when he met them because he’s featured in so few of the shots.

  You can hardly see a young, sunburned, shorn young Valentine standing, holding a shovel comically at “present arms” with a group dressed in Labor Battalion overalls outside of a fortified enclave gate reading Weening. A young Asian girl standing beside him makes a classic two-finger addition to his hairline. There’s a shot of a group of soldiers in Wolf leathers showing a mixed group of men and Grogs how to use a Southern Command machine gun, and a picture of a smiling family cutting the ribbon on a prefabricated pole-barn gate, two pretty blond daughters each holding half the shears. A gangly black youth holds two cows ready for entry into their new home.

  There’s a shot of Ahn-Kha digging up a
massive heartroot—a Golden One staple—for a group of interested farmers and uniformed people. There’s also a picture of a ship with a big gun on the bow and armoring around the bridge and weapon points tied up at a coastal wharf. A photo of a lithe little girl, black hair flying as she chases some seagulls on a sunny beach, shows signs of having been trimmed with a scissors. A newspaper clipping of someone named “Hank Smalls” smiling and holding a game ball after pitching a no-hitter in game one of the Transmississippi All-School pennant occupies a prominent place.

  There’s a picture of a salt-and-pepper-haired man in a wheelchair flying down a hill as a woman on his lap hangs on for dear life. Another one shows Valentine at the very back of a serious-looking crowd of bearded men who might be Mennonites standing in front of a massive rock etched with letters.

  A photo stamped SOUTHERN COMMAND VERIFIED RELEASE depicts a group of soldiers climbing off a riverbank boat, all wearing shiny, tinfoil skullcaps. A brand-new shot of a commanding-looking woman standing in front of some off-road vehicles with an assortment of hirelings soldiers is a new addition, as the shot is a professionally printed eight-by-ten and Valentine is clearly having trouble finding a protective frame. Her agedbut-still-handsome features and almost prim appearance contrast nicely with the armed men behind. Only Bears wear their atavistic garb of bones and teeth dangling off or pinning together captured Reaper robes with such lethal aplomb.

  There’s one newspaper clipping of himself, a shot that made it into Southern Command’s war museum, in fact, of David Valentine sitting mud-splattered in a command car next to the big golden Grog who now slumbers on the floor of his room.

  David Valentine had forgotten how much the smell and sound of Ahn-Kha comforted him. The Golden One’s vast presence was like having your old family dog sleeping nearby. Only better. The old family dog can’t knock a Reaper off its feet with one swing of its fist.

  As Ahn-Kha slept, bleeding heat like a cooling potbellied stove, Valentine read by a tiny shake-and-glow clip light. The light began to dim, and Valentine picked up the light, shook it vigorously until it visibly brightened, and then returned it to its magnetic cradle.