March in Country

by EE Knight

  “Don’t you shoot, I’m leaving,” the man in the wheelhouse said. He scuttled up a ladder to the flying bridge, butt and head tucked, and used the first two rungs to throw himself into the river.

  Lights appeared around the bend in the downstream Tennessee. Another River Patrol craft was coming in, hot and ready for action.

  Valentine went to the wheelhouse of the vacated boat, the one with the lights flashing. It was a smaller boat approaching, no flying bridge but what looked like a big damn multibarreled gun in front of the wheelhouse. Two oval ammo drums hung off it like testicles.

  Probably a crew of three.

  Valentine waited. It approached the dock, slowing, those gun barrels aimed up the riverbank, where Valentine saw scattered gun flashes. The Bears were sensibly using single shots. Nothing drew fire like long bursts of automatic.

  Valentine was busy looking at the boat’s spotlight. Seemed simple to operate, a smaller version of the cannon he’d known on the old Thunderbolt in the Gulf.

  “For fuck’s sake, they’re in the gun emplacement on the hill,” he shouted to the other boat. “Lay down some fire on it or they’ll blow you out of the water.”

  That didn’t work. The gunner wouldn’t be goaded into firing.

  He lit up the other boat, zeroed the spotlight in on the gunner. A face gleamed whitely before it threw up an arm to ward off the blinding light. Valentine tightened the spotlight beam as best as he could and then ran to the gun mount. He was chambering the first round of the belt when another spotlight struck, blinding him and shooting white pain through his head.

  Here it comes.

  Blindly, Valentine fell backward out of the boat and into the Tennessee. Bullets ripped up the cabin of the craft, killing the spotlight, then clanging off and through the armored shield on the rear mount.

  His head broke water behind the bulk of the tied-up boat.

  Fire poured down from the gun emplacement. Valentine saw two of Gamecock’s Bears, faces full of war paint and toothy helmets on, lighting the night with tracer from their miniguns. He could see the brass casings dancing off into the night.

  The boat swerved, headed for shore, the man at the wheel dead.

  Valentine raised the Browning knockoff, pointed it at a bleeding crewman who was attempting to return to his feet.

  “Okay, riverman, this is either the luckiest day of your life or the unluckiest. Take your pick.”

  The scuffed-up river patroller decided to be lucky.

  “That’s why I’m on the water. Can’t stand them hissing no-dicks,” he said, cheerfully taking the oath that would swear him into the battalion after hearing the terms.

  “Likewise,” a suspicious Bear agreed.

  “Can’t get away from ’em,” the sailor said. “Even when I’m upriver, still show up in bad dreams. Yellow-eyed bastards.” Valentine’s two Bears herded the survivors, hands clasped atop their heads, into the beer cooler.

  “Have a drink on us,” Gamecock suggested.

  “It’s safe-locked,” Dirty Nel said. “You can unscrew the latch from inside—even if we put a padlock on it.”

  Valentine reached into his tool belt and extracted some plastic triangles and began to shove them into the gap around the lock. He was the proud owner of a migraine, thanks to that damn spotlight running up his optic nerve like a gas flame.

  Dirty Nel looked at the wedge. “Where’d you get these? Looks like a kid’s toy.”

  “Evansville security services. They’re just wedges with a little quick glue on them. They’d use them when conducting a raid, or temporarily keeping those detained in an improvised secure location. Jam a couple of these into a door or window frame, and no one’s getting through without busting it down and making a lot of noise. Soft enough to jam in from either direction and stick.”

  “How do you get rid of them?”

  “Easy enough to dissolve, paint thinner and other acetates work. Nail polish remover.”

  “Oh, I always keep some of that around,” Dirty Nel said, rolling her eyes.

  “We don’t have to worry about opening them for now.”

  “Why do they call you Dirty Nel?”

  “You know, everyone asks me that within five minutes of meeting me,” she said, as slow smile on her face. “The men, anyways. Well, some women. Problem is, the real answer isn’t very interesting. So I keep silent. Whatever they come up with in they’s own heads, it’s better than the truth.”

  Seeing properly handled legworms in action still took Valentine’s breath away. With modified cargo saddles mounting a sort of oar-lock, old suspension cables were run and crossed in such a manner that the network of blocks and tackles could first hoist and then secure the emptied-out boat hulls. Then the paired legworms, with the hull between them like some kind of land-going catamaran, headed up the hill for the overland trip back to Evansville. The legworms moved as though they didn’t even know they were carrying a load—which, considering the tiny mass of nerve ganglia that passed for a brain in their midsection, was very probably true.

  The men had worked like furies. Everything that could possibly be done to lighten the hulls was tried. Weapons and armor were stripped; precious gasoline out of fuel tanks and into mobile trailer tanks pulled by the patient legworms; cordage, supplies, even portable stoves and the boat generators were unbolted and fixed to the tops of the worms. Engines were even taken out and put on boat trailers.

  In fact, the weapons and engines were more valuable than the hulls. Evansville had plenty of river-worthy hulls, what they lacked were arms and engines.

  Valentine gauged their progress to the sound of winter-dry grass crunching under hundreds of clawlike feet, a sound that reminded him of a covered cauldron of popcorn popping. “How long to get them back to the Ohio?” he asked the Gunslinger legworm drover.

  Another legworm passed, this one hauling a smaller boat on an old-fashioned trailer with oversized wheels. Despite the wheels, the drovers called the contraptions “sleds.” Other sleds carried engines, armor plating, light cannon on the river-craft mounts, and booty from the warehouses too heavy to risk mounting on the back of one of the worms. Put too heavy a load in one particular spot, and the shaggy skin tended to simply slide off in a big, wet, mattress-sized piece.

  “A damn long day, I expect. You boys do your end, we’ll do ours.”

  They had one scrape with a column of light armor out of Cadiz that resulted in a night action.

  Frat’s Wolves gave them plenty of warning as to size and route.

  Gamecock’s Bears, eager to use their new weapons, hustled off to set up machine guns and light cannon. Valentine, restricted to an observation point coordinating the attacks of the Bears and Wolves, saw only the night action from a distance.

  The captured ordnance of the River Patrol used an interesting mix of tracer—blues, greens, and reds. Perhaps the distinctive rainbow tracers helped the River Patrol distinguish friendly from enemy craft. Valentine filed the knowledge away, might come in handy at some future point.

  Meanwhile, he had boats to drag to the Ohio.

  “Well done, Valentine,” Colonel Lambert said, looking over the boats.

  “But what’s with all the aphrodisiacs? Is there something in the works I should know about?”

  “Yeah, Val, big weekend planned?”

  “I’m not sure—,” Valentine said.

  “We have twelve cases of Kurian Zone sexual stimulant under a couple of names.”

  “That was me, suh,” Gamecock said. “I made sure they brought it along. Not for us, now, but I thought it might be useful for trade. The Grogs love it. Gets them high as kites and horny as hell.”

  It was the sort of fuzzy case high-priced jewelry used to come in, a purple so deep it could pass for black in all but the best light.

  Valentine opened the presentation case. A shiny old piece of plastic lay inside, a cheap mockery of a police badge.

  BROTHEL INSPECTOR

  it read.

  “
I found it last summer in the ruins of a dollar store,” Duvalier said. “I’ve been carrying the stupid thing around ever since, waiting for the right opportunity.”

  “Hilarious,” Valentine said.

  “You should go over to Orfordville and break it in,” Frat said. “The Wolves say there are a couple of nice houses there. The Ordnance patrols west of Louisville sometimes de-uniform and sneak over.”

  “They’re true Kentucky as bourbon. We get regular reports about any loose tongues.”

  The party chuckled.

  Ahn-Kha’s uneven ears were up and forward. “I do not understand.”

  Duvalier, boosting herself up with his axe-handle shoulder like a gymnast mounting a pommel horse, whispered something in his ear.

  “Humans,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Banquets: Southern Command is famous for holding feasts at the drop of a hat. There are always a few volunteers ready to drop a hat themselves, if a better reason isn’t on the calendar or out-box.

  Word of a “feed” passes quickly, even before the barbecue smoke rises. In this case, the smoke was from one of the winter hogs raised on camp food waste and the inevitable spoiled food brought in on the irregular supply runs up the Ohio River by Southern Command’s “Mosquito Fleet.”

  Fort Seng’s were never as resourceful as Southern Command regulars at scrounging “grits, grease, and gluss”—the first two being traditional Transmississippi staples, the third liquor mashed, heated, and dripped out of any stray carbohydrates at hand. Gluss, another of the many names for army busthead, was a variant on Mosquito Fleet acronym General Liquor Unspecified, Standard Ration. Southern Command’s boatmen were legendary in the aptitude for acquiring alcohol—strictly for purifying questionable river water, of course—and, to cut down on the cases of ethanol poisoning, their captains took to issuing a small daily ration unit.

  The captured boats were returned briefly to the Ohio, but only to be taken up a short length of river to Evansville, where they were again hauled up out of the water and brought into riverside workshops. One boat, kept fully intact and armed in its drag across Western Kentucky, was tied up next to the old casino, to be used for training.

  The battalion was in the best spirits Valentine had ever seen. Upon returning from the operation, the companies that had gone out to get the boats immediately set to laundering and cleaning and polishing their bodies, uniforms, and equipment as though they couldn’t wait to be sent out again.

  They’d proved themselves before, certainly, in the fight against the ravies outbreak of the winter. But that had been purely reactive. The raids on Site Green and Respite Point were their idea, successfully carried out by the battalion.

  Colonel Lambert decided they needed a reward. The first of the spring vegetables were in, along with a bountiful amount of strawberries, so she decided to sacrifice a few head of cattle for a big steak fry.

  They used the big open field to the south where the brigade’s horses grazed. It was the largest stretch of flat, open ground in the confines of the fort. With the horses cleared away, it served as an athletic field for football, soccer, and baseball—and conditioning sprints, of course.

  Glass volunteered to miss the festivities—he was no social animal, and stayed with Ford and Chevy, his heavy-weapons Grogs, and the company left on security. Especially at a celebration like this the Grogs sometimes caused trouble. They believed the greatest warrior ate first and most and had trouble with the human tendency to share out by the plateful.

  Lambert skipped it as well, though she gave Ediyak the night off. Valentine filled a tray with steak and sauce, strawberries and clotted cream, and some tender spring vegetables (asparagus was early and plentiful in Kentucky, leaving the fort’s latrines more pungent than usual) and brought it up to her. Even if the ascetic workaholic in her was currently reining in her appetite, he could eat both their shares. He could still smell the grill on the steaks and his mouth watered at the hot, fatty smell.

  “I’ve been studying this map of the Eastern United States,” Lambert said as he set down the tray on an empty chair. Lambert’s desk was unusually cluttered with notes and colored grease pencils for writing on the plastic overlays that lay on the maps.

  The bright light of her desk lamp reflecting off the map hurt Valentine’s eyes and gave him the beginnings of one of his headaches.

  Valentine glanced over it. Old maps were interesting but of limited use. Most of the roads were overgrown and broken up and the towns run back to kudzu and scrub oak.

  “If we only had something comprehensive and up-to-date,” Lambert said.

  “I know, sir,” Valentine said. “Someone really needs to make some new maps,” Valentine said. “The Kurians have good local ones, but beyond their regions—”

  “Here be dragons,” Lambert said.

  “Basically, sir.”

  “Maybe we can team up with the Kentuckians and get something accurate of at least the zones surrounding us. If the Georgia Control is going to come after us, it would help to know what roads and rail lines they still have up and running. What bits are full of bad guys and where the hostile neutrals and Grog tribes are. But the rivers are still the same.”

  “Yes, sir,” Valentine said.

  She placed her palm over an area covering Western Kentucky, the southern arrow tip of Illinois, southeastern Missouri, and a corner of Tennessee.

  “Whoever controls these waterways has the Ohio, the Tennessee, the Missouri, and most importantly, the Mississippi.”

  “I see, sir,” Valentine said.

  “It reminds me of something Shelby Foote said about Gettysburg,” Lambert said. “Gettysburg was at a nexus of roads, so when the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac were chasing around up through Maryland and into Pennsylvania, Gettysburg turned into a place where both armies could concentrate quickly. He called it a spiderweb or something.”

  Valentine was a bit of a Civil War buff as well and vaguely remembered that quote, and nodded.

  “Back in de Tocqueville’s day, in the early days of rail, there was some contention over whether river or rail traffic would win out. Rail won, of course, but there’s still a lot to be said for barges.”

  Valentine, who’d learned his service in the hard school of foot-soldiering with the Wolves, couldn’t agree more. In his days with the Coastal Marines, while serving in the Kurian Order working his way into a slot in the Thunderbolt, had marveled at how easily tonnage could be moved by water.

  “What Southern Command should do is put all its efforts into controlling the river between Arkansas and here,” Lambert said.

  “Against the River Patrol, sir?” Valentine asked.

  “It would be a matter of choking off a few big bases of theirs. Vicksburg to the south, and the one on the Tennessee-Kentucky Border, and the Iowa fortress. We’ve got the Ohio choked off here. Now we’ve got the boats to contest the Ohio, and the mouth of the Tennessee. Maybe even all the way to the Mississippi.”

  “For now, sir,” Valentine said. “They’ll get sick of us at some point. I’m not sure I like our chances for holding them off without a lot more support from Southern Command. With Martinez in charge—”

  Lambert held up her hand. “I envy you in a way, Valentine.”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Your career. It’s dead, just not buried. Gives you a great deal of leeway. You’re a free man. You can say what you like.”

  “Sorry, sir, if I’ve been too free with my opinions.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Valentine. I’d rather have you letting off steam to me in here than in front of the men. I’m not in a position to stop you.”

  Like her uniform, Lambert rarely showed anything other than her usual efficient mind-set. Valentine wasn’t sure how to handle a colonel suddenly turned prosaic. “Odd thing to say about someone in uniform, sir. You can order me to hopscotch to your door and back, bad leg and all.”

  “In retur
n you can bleat, ‘Up yours, L-a-a-a-mbert,’ the way they used to in elementary school. Not a heck of a lot I can threaten you with in return, except maybe to kick you off base.”

  “With great freedom goes great responsibility. Or that’s how it should work,” Valentine said.

  “Didn’t some movie character say that?” Lambert asked.

  “I think that might have been Spider-Man,” Valentine said. “Frankly, sir, I’m not used to hearing you talk this way.”

  She nibbled at one of the asparagus spears, stood up and started to pace her office. “The Respite Point raid has me hoping again. Those boats might give us some real mobility. I’d like that freedom. I feel trapped in this headquarters, sometimes.” She ran a finger across a heavy wooden mantel. “Even if it is a comfortable prison.”

  “You’re the base commander, sir. The KZ types or people who aren’t in the service might think you’re the freest one here, since you’re at the top of the rank table, but most know better. If I could give you one piece of advice—it’s okay to dig your heels in when you’re right and upchannel to HQ is wrong. You’re here and they’re not.”

  “Now you’re being philosophical. That’s a recipe for not getting anything done at all. Better go back out and get the music going.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Make sure not too much liquor is being smuggled into the party.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  He headed for the back entrance. The musicians were assembling on the back patio in the lights.

  Valentine looked out into the darkened fields at the big tents in the athletic field, lit up like New Year’s was celebrating Christmas’s birthday. The barbecues glowed warm and the smells—Valentine’s nose could smell food farther off than he could smell blood—were warm and inviting.

  His stomach growled.

  Pellwell was taking the steps up from the gardens two at a time.

  “Valentine,” she called.

  Her usual composure had deteriorated into twitchy agitation. The ratbit on her shoulder had its head buried in her hair.