March in Country

by EE Knight

  Valentine got a glimpse of the alleyways of the Gray One quarters. He’d never seen Gray One urbanization before, and he wished he was at liberty to take a better look. From a distance, their ghetto reminded him of a creative child’s stack of blocks. Prefabricated housing trailers were grafted on, dug in, suspended over, and bridging older human single-family homes into what looked like a haphazard pile, but probably had something to do with chiefs and sub-chiefs and their clans. The ghetto clattered and buzzed and smoked. There was electricity in most housing, but for water it looked like the residents had to use troughs and pumps set out in the yards of the older human houses.

  Back in the hills behind the headquarters megachurch, Valentine saw a few more elegant houses, presumably the Baron and his main lieutenants lived there, several barns of various types, and an expansive training area on the distant hills. He saw groups of Gray Ones, antlike in the distance, moving upslope and down, crossing various sorts of obstacles, breaking up and re-forming like waves striking rocks, and some hand-to-hand tussles.

  Of the Golden Ones he saw nothing; though up by the dust and clatter in town he did see the giraffe necks of cranes and a vaguely pyramidal structure rising next to them.

  Before he could get a better look at the distant, dust-shrouded construction, Valentine was brought before a little cinder-block building with a sod roof. GUARD AUXILIARY MONGO STATION ARRIVALS read the stencils on the door lintel. It had a hand-painted sign out front as well: ABANDON ALL HONOR, YE WHO ENTER HERE—AND RETIRE RICH. Even the doormat had a legend, Valentine noticed, but the letters were mostly obscured by mud.

  OAR

  In the “Arrivals” blockhouse, they negotiated Valentine’s sale in the time it might take Valentine to turn in a bag of laundry and his best uniform at a Southern Command Laundromat.

  Valentine submitted to the usual once-over. They looked into his eyes, ears, checked his teeth, combed through his hair looking for vermin, looked at his nails and tongue and toes.

  They didn’t like his limp and made him walk, run, and hop along the spring mud flanking the blockhouse.

  After a good deal more argument they settled on a price, it seemed. Ahn-Kha walked over to Valentine.

  “I claimed you fought me like an evil spirit and you’d no doubt won your scars in battle,” he murmured, removing the lead. “They claim you’re fit only for use as a draft block in a doorjamb, but I suspect they are pleased to have you.”

  Ahn-Kha insisted that their price for such a healthy specimen wasn’t satisfactory, and the manager there finally accepted a deal where they would see how the captive worked, and if he lived up to Ahn-Kha’s promises, they’d meet his price.

  Ahn-Kha leaned on the counter so heavily Valentine could hear nails working free. “He’s to be well treated, until my price is met.”

  They sprayed off the mud with a power hose they kept at the gate to the motor vehicle revetment. Valentine rather enjoyed all the mud being blasted off, though his skin felt like it had been sandpapered after. The towel they gave him to dry off was rough and stiff and had not met soap since the previous March, but it was as clean as well water could make it.

  Sergeant Stock hung around, watching, which seemed a waste of time for a man due for liberty.

  He threw the towel over his head and shoulders, assuming that his nakedness would draw attention rather than his face. If there were still wanted posters out for him, they were for a much more youthful face and long black hair.

  A corporal with another odd variant of a short whip—it looked like a stingray tail Valentine had seen in the Gulf—led him to a white-painted prefab with a Quonset-hut-style roof. Valentine noticed a red cross painted on the roof—as if Southern Command or the Grogs had an air force that might bomb the Baron’s headquarters—and took him inside. Valentine’s nose smelled rubbing alcohol and Kurian Zone disinfectant of the sort that came in fifty-gallon drums sweetly reeking of artificial lemon.

  He was glad the place sparkled and smelled. At least he wouldn’t be probed with a blood-encrusted finger.

  “Wait here,” the corporal ordered, shoving him into a folding metal chair.

  Stock, who was still watching, spoke up. “Easy there, Corp. This Scrubman’s been a broke horse the whole march in.” Turning to Valentine, he said, “Relax. Didn’t you read the doormat? No fear. Goons over with here. No Reapers. Savvy?”

  With that, he walked out of the building.

  Was that a code, Valentine thought? Relax, I recognize you, your secret is safe? Or is he just kindly to human captives. The Molly Carlson he’d known wouldn’t have married a brute, not after what she’d been through; if anything, she’d only be courted by the most gentle of men. Probably just his nature.

  More waiting. Valentine grew ever hungrier, and his stomach growled. The corporal’s knuckles whitened on the whip handle, but he otherwise didn’t move.

  At last, a cough preceded a medical man, with an orderly trailing behind carrying a tray full of instruments and some jars.

  The doctor, a gray-hair who looked terribly frail for a forward military camp, examined Valentine. The medical man knew his business. He looked into his eyes, ears, and throat, listened to his heart and breathing through a stethoscope, tut-tutted over the old steam burns on his back, palpitated his scrotum and had Valentine cough, and ran some sort of irritatingly dry swab up his rectum.

  He paused over the old gunshot wound in his leg. He cocked his head first to one angle, then another as he looked at it. He reminded Valentine of a pigeon he’d once watched in New Orleans, deciding if a dropped coin was edible.

  “Bad, this. How old is it?”

  Valentine dropped his mouth open wide and acted as though he’d been asked to construe Wittgenstein. “Errrrrrrup—not baby to manhood. Baby to hunting age.”

  “In years, please. Four seasons equals a year.”

  “Four. No, ten. Tenteen?”

  The doctor sighed. “Never mind. It still gives you trouble?”

  “No run long,” Valentine said, which was close to the truth.

  “Could have been worse, Scrubman. It might have hit your femoral artery. You would have been dead in seconds. Next time you have the opportunity you might want to sacrifice a chicken or whatever you do to appease fortune.”

  Valentine didn’t mind being talked down to. It meant the disguise was working, at least so far.

  The doctor took out a white instrument like a thick pen. He folded it open to reveal a little screen on a swing arm.

  “Orderly, starting SSI scan.”

  The orderly picked up Valentine’s clipboard and a pencil.

  The instrument passed from temple to temple. Valentine felt a crackling presence across his skin, like a piece of wool that’s built up a strong static charge.

  “Subject fifty-one-eleven, Mentation weak A. That’s interesting. Too bad he didn’t get some education. Emotional weak C, no, I’ll call that a strong D—he’s seen a lot of stress, by the look of it, and he’s got it buried deep. I’ve gotten strong Ds out of semi-sentient Grogs. He either tortures critters or he cries at the sight of a dead baby bird, I’ll bet. Delta signal—whoa there, strong B.” Valentine felt the instrument touch him midforehead. “No, weak A—no, strong A ... dropped back to B again. The hell? This SSI needs a factory recalibration, that can’t be right with a Scrubman. And we’re back at A, steady. I think this SSI’s crapped out.”

  He tested it briefly on the orderly. Valentine watched its screen travel from green to pink, with little arrows and letters appearing as he moved it across the man’s forehead. “Hmmm,” he said.

  The doctor turned and stared hard into Valentine’s eyes. “You’re not a Kurian agent, I’m guessing, unless our dear Baron’s made some powerful enemies. An agent wouldn’t dink around in the labor pens. He’d walk right into headquarters.”

  Valentine tried to look blank and uncomprehending, and offered a nervous smile. “Haircut now?” he asked.

  “Wonder who whelped this pup
and who his father was,” the doc mused, folding up his instrument again.

  The stingray-whip corporal took a firm grip on his upper arm and led him past a small motor pool filled with rebuilt trucks—the sleek twenty-first-century panels had been replaced with brutally ugly corrugated steel painted in that same vertical camo scheme—to a pole barn filled with shipping containers and tables.

  They issued Valentine a set of plain white canvas pants and a shirt, along with some mass-produced sandals that he’d last seen in Xanadu. The shirt, probably once stiff and uncomfortable, had been washed down to an almost flannel smoothness. Valentine noticed there was a patch sewn on the right breast, shaped to look like a shovel-head with a number 3 on it.

  “Don’t worry, in the winter you’ll get boots,” his corporal said.

  “No kill? No eat?”

  The corporal cracked a smile for the first time. “Believe me, this isn’t the end of the line for you. Getting roped by that Grog’s the best thing that ever happened to you. Getting any of this?”

  “Yes-yes,” Valentine said. “Littles.”

  “Do as you’re told and you’re entitled to three hots and a cot. If you’re doing heavy labor, you get snacks, even. I grew up in Illinois, farm labor, and we didn’t get that unless our families snuck it out to us, so appreciate it. We only send screwups back north. We’ve had some guys come out of the pens and make sergeant. I don’t suppose you can read and write—”

  “Read, yes, read good.”

  The corporal chuckled. “Well, they’ll test you, so let’s wait—Hey, look alive, if you know what’s good for you, here’s the man himself. That there’s the Baron, Scrubman, he owns your ass now. You do what he say, you can rise right up to a piece of Iowa heaven. Cross him and you’ll be turned into pig feed.”

  Two four wheelers and a pickup truck rolled through camp at a gentle pace. Valentine assumed that the Baron was in the first car, the passenger seat of a polished, high-clearance jeep-style vehicle. He wore a long legworm-leather duster of a reddish-brown hue with its brass-tipped collar turned up and the brim of his old military-style scrambled eggs cap down low. He wore big reflective sunglasses, in fact, put a corncob pipe in his mouth, and in that cap and glasses and Valentine thought he might pass for General MacArthur.

  The corporal saluted as the cars passed and Valentine aped him, poorly. The Baron gave no sign he’d seen them.

  The rear truck had a camper on the back with old bulletproof vests fixed over the windows. Valentine supposed some Grog body-guards were within, looking out at the world through concealed firing slits.

  The corporal looked pleased with the salute.

  “Seeing as it’s your first day, we’ll let you get settled in quarters.”

  The corporal took him to an old basement that had been timbered over with sod. Two ventilation pipes stuck up, without any sort of cover to keep out the rain. The corporal pulled back a tarp and brought him downstairs.

  It smelled like body odor, wet wool, and possibly ferrets within, but to the eye it was clear enough. There were window wells, partially blocked up to prevent someone from sneaking out, that admitted some light. Most of the furniture was bunks, but there was also a big five-gallon plastic water barrel with a permanently stopped spigot hole. Instead of that there was a siphon hose and a cup.

  “This is Hole Three. Can you say that?”

  “Hole threes,” Valentine repeated.

  “Remember that. Any bunk without a blanket you can take.”

  Valentine decided he had to choose between light and fresh air and warmth. He chose light and fresh air, and took an unoccupied bottom-bunk near the door.

  “Here, you won’t eat until breakfast,” the corporal said, rummaging in one of his big cargo pockets and pulling out something wrapped in foil. “Unless you’re in the hospital, you only eat on the job site. Don’t know if you’re too smart or too dumb for all this, but I appreciate you not fussing and spitting, Scrubman.”

  The outer wrapper had a label with a picture of snowcapped mountains. It tasted of real cocoa and sugar and had plenty of peanuts in it. If a corporal in the Gray Baron’s command could afford to give away chocolate like this to a prisoner as a kindly afterthought, they must be doing very well indeed in the Kurian Order. Valentine had sipped ersatz cocoa with many a New Universal churchman, even in Louisiana with its access to ocean trade.

  Valentine ate half and saved the rest.

  Everyone called him Scar.

  Hole Three was run by a fleshy man known as Fat Daddy. Valentine wasn’t sure of the source of his authority, as he went directly to his bunk and didn’t move, even to urinate. His urine was collected and dumped into the basement urine bucket—he later found out every drop was saved, it went to a fertilizer manufacturer—by an injury-hobbled old man called Pappy.

  They were all wary of him at first, in his clean new clothes. Fat Daddy distributed the soap ration, and there was none left once his own ample body and that of his rather gorgeous, bewigged golden boy were taken care of. A mix of servant, jester, and lover, the effeminate youth slept like a dog on his plastic-covered mattress at the foot of Fat Daddy’s pushed-together bunks. Everyone called him Beach Boy and he was the one who gave Valentine the “Scar” moniker.

  “Just do like Fat Daddy says and everything’ll work out swell,” Pappy advised him.

  Valentine suspected they’d sniff his chocolate out sooner or later. Better to give it up voluntarily than be put in his place in the pecking order by having it taken from him forcibly. Despite his lurking hunger, he offered it to Pappy.

  “You looks hungries, grandfathers,” Valentine said, offering.

  “Naw, I couldn’t,” Pappy said. He shot a glance around, most of the workers were stripping and hanging up their clothes so they’d dry out by morning, or they were taking drinks from the plastic bucket by letting a siphoned jet of water spray into their mouths so as not to touch the plastic end. Pappy still eyed it, licking his lips.

  “Give it here, Pappy,” Fat Daddy said. Valentine wasn’t sure they were even watching.

  Pappy grabbed it and brought it over to Fat Daddy in his bunk. Beach Boy—though Valentine didn’t know the name yet—took it, smelled it, and insouciantly popped a chunk in his mouth before handing it to Fat Daddy.

  “Naughty boy,” Fat Daddy said. He tasted it. “This is good stuff, new meat. Hey, Boy, new meat needs a name.”

  Beach Boy made a great show of licking his lips. “Scar.”

  Valentine liked the work. Maddeningly so.

  He spent his days working with excrement, or drying it and then transporting it to the fields, rather.

  It was filthy stuff for a man as fastidious about his own cleanliness as Valentine, filling a trailer with liquid “hot honey” and raking it out into a field to dry with other organic waste in the sun. The better job, in some ways, was taking the dried version of it, known as “brown sugar” out to the fields, though in spreading it some dust would get up and you’d have to spend the day with a rag tied around your face and the uncomfortable thought that you were blinking feces out of your eyes. There it was turned into quick-growing heartroot, or other more traditional Midwestern vegetables and grains—there were even paddies for rice. Most of the heartroot was broken up and added to scraps for pig feed or to granary leavings for the chickens the Gray Ones kept in little household coops or vast stacks in the pole barns.

  The work was done by men because Grog warriors would not be stained by such duty, fit only for slaves. So the men of the forced-labor group, a collection of criminals, last-chancers, and sold-off Grog slaves of dubious origins such as himself, did work no warrior would take up, and the few Grog females in the Baron’s stronghold were too valuable to sully with such labor.

  Valentine followed orders, took his three hots and a cot, and waited in absurd, smelly happiness. They ate their meals outdoors, in the sun in good weather, under a tent or inside available transport in bad. He felt his body toughening under the dawn-to-
dusk days, and there were no worries beyond his being recognized. There was a part of him that hated responsibility, the endless choices between bad outcomes that came with military life, the paperwork that no one ever read, useful only to the creators of file cabinets and document storage boxes.

  His work wasn’t limited to agriculture. Anything having to do with shit would cause an officer or a Grog chief to call in the forced-labor group. Valentine and Pappy were sometimes called into the Grog Quarter to deal with a stuffed-up toilet drain. He’d crouch to walk under lofted housing, or pass through alleys just wide enough to allow two Grogs to face each other and squeeze through. He smelled delicious steak and vegetable kabobs being cooked on tiny charcoal stoves and took cover when raucous games of throw-and-block or breakgrip burst out of multihome courtyards and into the streets, paths and alleys. He smelled tobacco and hot iron and apple-wood smokers. The Gray Ones loved pine and orange oils in their homes to cover the scent of a stopped drain.

  “They also slosh around a lot of oil and burn it when the she-Grogs go fertile,” Pappy said. “Grogs theyselves don’t cause too much trouble about mating if there are no eligible females about, as long as they don’t smell ’em. But if they get a whiff, it’s Katie bar the door, ’cause you’re about to get plugged in like a surge protector.”

  He also saw the Golden One quarters. Many still lived in tents, but more permanent housing formed of bricks reclaimed from the town and the output of a new Golden One-run sawmill was going up. Their quarters were laid out with more precision than the Gray One piles of housing, but each Golden One had less space. A whole family of six would be put into just a half basement.

  Valentine felt for them. It was never fun to sleep in the same place you cooked.