by E. E. Knight
"Season's Greetings," Valentine said. "It's customary to give a little something in exchange for valuable information."
He reached in and extracted three bolts of fabric. "Denim, of course, and I hope you like that green. You're the kind of blond who can wear green."
A big bag of buttons came next. "Most of them match. I looked. I figured you could trade any you didn't like."
Shoes in various sizes for Edward came next, a heavy slab of bacon in waxed paper, great loops of sausage like ox yokes, some lemons and limes, candied dates, and a black-and-white ceramic cow that had probably once been a cookie jar.
He'd let Molly discover the cookies inside on her own, if Edward didn't first.
"Thought it looked like the cows in Wisconsin."
"Holsteins," Molly said, her hand at her throat.
Tea, powdered sugar, a bottle of brandy, even elastic-banded socks and underwear—luxuries all, smuggled from the Kurian Zone, no doubt, but it was considered bad taste to ask a trader questions beyond quality—all joined the growing pile on the tiny table.
"And some cans of jelly," Valentine finished.
"Jelly!" Edward said.
"You're too . . . too much, David. They were just words, and I was angry."
"I thought it was kind of refreshing. First time we'd been honest with each other since . . . well, your dad's basement."
Molly blushed, but just a little. "We were just about to have macaroni and ration cheese." The tiniest pause after "macaroni" told Valentine all he needed to know about what she thought of Southern Command's "cheese"—an oily yellow concoction that tasted faintly like axle grease. "I can fill another plate."
"Fine."
They ate on the steps of the porch rather than clear off the table. "It occurred to me on the ride back that I didn't know if you could sew," Valentine said. "I recall you were good with leather."
"Not like my mom. But I'm getting better."
One of Molly's civilian neighbors, a tight-faced, tan woman, walked by and took a second look at Valentine. Then she turned her face straight to home with everything but an audible hmpff.
After Edward went to bed they talked. Looking back on it Valentine realized that he talked and Molly listened. Beck and leaving the Wolves, Duvalier and training as a Cat, the Eagle D Brand in Nebraska's sand hills, the wild night of fire in the General's hangar, Jamaica, Haiti, ratbits, finding out that he'd be a father one rainy day in the Texas pinewoods. The deaths of M'Daw and and the Smalls, Hank. He raised his shirt and she touched the burns on his back.
He couldn't feel whether her fingertips probed or caressed. The surface nerves were mostly dead.
It felt so good to talk about it, maybe because Molly was a piece of his life dating back to before so much of it had happened.
"I can't sit anymore. There's a beautiful moon," Molly said. "You want to take a walk?"
Valentine wasn't sure he did. Or he wasn't sure of the part of himself that did, anyway. "What about Edward?"
"Mrs. Colbert can listen for him. She hears everything that goes on in the cabin anyway. It's all of eight feet away."
"Anything to help Southern Command's cheese along," Valentine said. "You'd think something that greasy—"
"What is it about soldiers and their bowels?" Molly asked. "You'd think with a woman and a moon and a warm night you'd just—
Horse hooves clip-clopped through the gravel and turned up the little lane running between the rows of bunkhouses.
Four men on horseback leading a fifth saddled horse appeared. One of Valdez's men walked ahead, and pointed toward Molly's cabin.
Valentine could make out the uniforms even in the dim light. The two in back were Wolves; there was no mistaking the trademark soft buckskins and fringed rifle sheaths. The others wore the plain khaki and the round-brimmed "Smokey" hats of the Rounders, Southern Command's law enforcement branch.
Usually veteran Guards, the Rounders patrolled the roads and bridges of Southern Command keeping the population safe from "bummers"—people in the Ozarks without a stake of one kind or another, who were often conduits of everything from black-market antibiotics to military information—and outright criminals.
The Rounders often brought bad news to the harder-to-reach families as well. Rounder on the doorstep was a phrase that meant misfortune to most people living outside the towns.
"Rounders," Molly said, echoing his thoughts.
The horses stopped in front of her cabin and Edward appeared, seeking the comfort of her hem. She picked her son up.
Valentine went to the screen door of the tiny porch.
"You Major Valentine?" a man with jowls spilling over his frayed collar asked as he approached.
The Wolves stayed on their horses. One looked halfway familiar to Valentine—then it came to him; he'd been a Wolf at his Invocation, though the name escaped him. The Wolves' hands were conspicuously off their weapons.
"Could you step outside, sir?" The jowly man's laminated name tag said Goebbert.
"What's this about?"
"Just step outside, please, sir."
They ignored Molly and her wide-eyed child. As Valentine came out the Wolves got off their horses.
"You're a hard guy to find, Valentine," the other Rounder put in. He had cockeyed ears, like a hound listening to a raccoon on the roof. He handed a pair of handcuffs to Goebbert.
"Sir, please turn around and put your hands behind you."
Valentine's heart fired like a triphammer. What the hell?
"What's this about?" Valentine repeated, sounding a lot less like a major this time.
"You're under arrest for murder," Goebbert said.
"Murder?" Valentine felt sweat everywhere.
Goebbert grabbed him firmly by the wrist. "Sorry, Major, orders."
They patted him down. Valentine winced as the hard hands traveled over the old scar tissue on the backs of his legs.
"David, what's going on?" Molly asked from her porch. She held Edward sideways, putting her body in between her son and the four strangers.
"It's got to be a mistake," Valentine said, looking again at the Wolf. Hammond, that was his name. The other young Wolves called him "Lightning" because he had a little tuft of blond hair in his brown.
"Might be," Goebbert said. "But we have to take you to court. Okay, Jim, he's in custody. Make a note of the time."
"Hammond, what is this?" Valentine asked.
Hammond might have smiled—his walrus mustache changed shape—though Valentine wondered why he would look pleased to be recognized by someone being arrested for murder. "We just got orders to make sure you come in. These boys were scared you'd get wind and take to the hills."
Molly had doubt in her eyes; she squinted against it as she might protect herself against dust.
"Molly, I'm not a fugitive. I wasn't hiding with you."
"Enough, Major," Goebbert said. "We've got to get you away. Help him mount, Hammond."
"Put him up backward. Fugitive mount," Uneven Ears said. "They say he's tricky."
The Wolves helped him mount. Sitting backward on the saddle made the night even more surreal. "My gear's in the barn—"
"It'll come along," the other Wolf put in.
"Where are you taking him?" Molly blurted, perhaps too emotionally, for Edward started to cry.
"Crowley Garrison Station, then on to Fort Allnutt, ma'am," Goebbert replied. Valentine craned his neck around and saw Goebbert shaking his head at his fellow Rounder.
David Valentine rode out of Quapaw Post backward. The soldiers came out of their cabins to see the "rogue parade," wondering faces glowing in the moonlight like jack-o'-lanterns.
They showed their paperwork at the gate, and carried out his gear on the Wolves' horses. Valentine, facing backward on his mount, carried only the memory of the fear in Edward Stockton's eyes. And the doubt in Molly's.
Chapter
Five
The Nut, May: The Nut was an Arkansas State Medium Security Correctiona
l Facility known as Pine Ridge before the Kurian Order, and would probably have remained another overgrown jumble of fence and concrete were it not for Mountain Home, the nearby town that fate selected to be the capital of the Ozark Free Territory (2028-2070).
There are any number of legends as to how Mountain Home ("Gateway to the Ozarks") became the seat of the Free Territory and the headquarters of Southern Command. The more colorful legends involve a poker game, a fistfight, a bad map, a general's mistress, or a souvenir shot glass, but the most likely story concerns Colonel "Highball" Holloway and her wayward signals column.
The colonel and her sixteen vehicles were one of hundreds of fragments fleeing the debacle south of Indianapolis that marked the end of the United States government as most Americans recognized it. While topping a hill northeast of Mountain Home two of her trucks collided, and Colonel Holloway established her signals company in the nearby town of Mountain Home. USAF General J. N. Probst, in charge of a substantial shipment of the first ravies vaccine, heard Holloway's test transmissions and rerouted his staff to make use of the army's facilities. Soon the fragments of everything from National Guard formations to a regiment of Green Berets were being inoculated and reorganized around Mountain Home. Civilians flocked to the protection of the military guns and vehicles, and a government had to be established to manage them. Some chafing in the first years as to whether Southern Command ran the Ozark Free Territory or the Ozark civilians ran Southern Command settled into the American tradition of military subordination to civilian authority—provided the civilians abided by the Constitution and held regular elections.
In those chaotic years the only law was martial—unless one counts the occasional lunchtime trial and afternoon hanging of looters and "profiteers" by horse and bike-mounted posses. Military justice required an incarceration facility, and as the only other prison nearby was being used to house ravies sufferers in the hope of finding a cure, Pine Ridge became Fort Allnutt, named for its first commander.
Sometime after his death it became "the Nut."
The Nut is an asterisk-shaped building that might pass as a college dormitory were it not for the bars on the windows. Double lines of fencing separate it from the fields—the prisoners grow their own crops and raise their own livestock and the better behaved they are the more time they get outside the wire—and subsidiary buildings have sprung up around it. Two technical workshops, a health clinic, the guard dorm, and the courthouse that doubles as an administrative center surround the six-story concrete asterisk. Finally there's "the Garage," an aluminum barn that houses a few wrecks used for spare parts. The Garage is where condemned men are hung, traditionally at midnight on their day of execution.
* * * *
Valentine was proud of his memory, but in later years he never recalled his arrival at the Nut with any real clarity. Mostly he remembered a military lawyer reading the charges against him to a gray and grave presiding officer: torture and murder of prisoners under his supervision during the rising in Little Rock the wild night of what was occasionally being called Valentine's Rising.
Six men had died at the hands of the women he'd freed from the Kurian prison camp. They were guards who had used dozens of women under their supervision as sort of a personal harem. Valentine had never known their names and it was strange to hear them read out in court with all the formality that legal proceedings required—one wasn't known by any name other than "Claw."
Southern Command rarely tried its officers for the execution of armed Quislings—men caught fighting for the vampires were disposed of under a procedure informally called "bang-and-bury."
Two generations of bitter feelings between the sides, and the Kurian habit of sending their own armed prisoners straight to the Reapers, had hardened both sides.
"The court finds cause for a trial." Valentine remembered that phrase. The judge declared that Valentine should be kept within Fort Alnutt until the date of his trial, set for the end of the month: May twenty-third, to be precise.
This rapidity struck Valentine as strange; his knowledge of Southern Command jurisprudence was based on one bad hearing after the destruction of Foxtrot Company at Little Timber Hill and the occasional Southern Command Bulletin article, and it was rare to be tried within six months of one's arrest.
And with those words he went dumbly through the sanitary procedures at the jail entrance, climbed into shapeless baby-blue scrubs with large yellow Xs sewn onto the back, each leg, and the chest pocket, and went to his cell.
His cell he remembered. As a major he got his own room in what his guard escort told him was the nicer wing of the Nut. There was a door with a small glass window rather than bars, and windows that would open to admit a breeze, though the sturdy metal frame was designed so that he couldn't crawl out.
The room had five one-foot-square green linoleum floor tiles across, and nine deep. The bolted-down bed bore a single plastic-wrapped mattress and a depressed-looking pillow in a cotton case that smelled like bleach, as did his combination sink and toilet. His ceiling had a brown-painted light fixture but no bulb: "They don't waste fluorescent tubes on cons, so the sun decides 'lights out,' " the guard said. "Hot chow in the cafeteria twice a day, and we bring out a soup and bread cart to the exercise yard for lunch. Questions?"
"How do I get a shave?" Valentine asked, rubbing his three-day beard.
The guard, whose name tag read Young, but looked as though his first name should be "Gus" or "Mick" or something else hearty and friendly, stuck his thumb in a belt loop. "There's two razors in the showers. You have to use them under supervision. Be sure to put it back in the blue cleanser—"
"I'm not a suicide."
"Didn't say you were. We keep an eye on sharp edges here. Lots of the guys just grow beards until trial."
Valentine looked at what appeared to be a hundred keys at the guard's waist. "Is there a library?"
"Mostly paperbacks held together with rubber bands, and porn. There's a bookcase or two for the highbrows. We've got a store with the Provisional Journal and Serial Digest for sale; you can earn money in the fields or with janitorial work. Kitchen's full up now."
"Thank you." The formal politeness came out despite the circumstances.
"No problem, Major Valentine. Good luck with the trial. There's a packet of rules and instructions under your pillow. We do an hourly pass through if you need anything."
"A lawyer would be nice."
"You'll have a meeting tomorrow or the next day."
His uniform "scrubs" were poorly finished on the inside. Loose threads tickled whenever he walked. By the time he finished biting off the stray threads with his teeth it was time for dinner.
Officers awaiting trial had a small cafeteria to themselves. Valentine ended up being at the end of the blue-and-yellow file escorted by Young and another guard to the central cafeteria.
Dinner, plopped onto a tray and eaten with a bent-tined fork and a spoon that looked as though it dated from the War of 1812, consisted of an unappetizing vegetable goulash with ground meat.
Two clusters of officers ate together at opposite sides of the cafeteria. A narrow man with long, thinning, butterscotch hair in the smaller of the two cliques looked up at Valentine and made a motion to the seat next to him, but Valentine just dropped into the seat nearest the end of the food service line—and immediately regretted it. He felt alone and friendless, as though already dead, forgotten and entombed in this prison. After dinner some of the men smoked, and Valentine went to the slitlike barred windows and enjoyed the breeze created by the kitchen extractor fans. The Ozarks were black in the distance, the sun masked by haze.
"Shooter or looter?" a reedy voice said.
Didn't even hear him come. Valentine felt thick and tired, brain too apathetic to even function—if he didn't know better he'd suspect one of the mild Kurian sedatives had been put in the food.
He looked at the man, short and close to bald, with an ivory mustache and growing beard, smoking a cigarette from a
whittled holder. The eyes were crinkled and friendly.
"Pardon?"
"Shooter or looter, boy? You're the new squirrel in the nut. What they got you in for?"
Valentine tried to make sense of the metaphor and gave up. "Murder. Quislings."
"Then you're a shooter. That's those three over there." He turned his chin in the direction of the group with the long-haired man. "I'm Berlinelli. Malfeasance in the performance of my duties."
"Meaning?"
"Looter. I was doing what a lot of other guys were doing, on a larger scale. Siphoning gasoline and diesel out of captured trucks and selling it."
"I thought everyone in prison was innocent," Valentine said, a bit startled at the man's frankness.
"If you're a snitch it's no hair lifted. I'm pleading out."
"I haven't even talked to my lawyer yet. I need to write some letters. You wouldn't know where I could get paper, would you?"
"Who's running your floor?"
"The guard? Young, I think."
"He's a decent guy. Just ask him." He tapped his wooden cigarette holder on the windowsill and winked. "Got to get back to my tribe. It's Grogs and Harpies in here; we don't mix much."
"Thanks for crossing no-man's-land."
"Just a little recon. Mission accomplished."
Valentine asked Young about paper and a pen as they locked him back in his cell. The long-haired man was two doors down.
"Ummm," Valentine said. "Corporal Young?"
"Yes, Major?"
"Could I get some paper and a pencil? I need to write a few people and let them know where I am." And he should write Post and give him the findings of the aborted investigation, which amounted to a few more facts but zero in the way of answers.
"Sure. It's a standard SC envelope; just don't seal it. Censors. I'll slip them under the door gap tonight on my rounds."
"Right. Thank you."
Young unlocked Valentine's door. Valentine couldn't help but glance at the fixture of a secondary bar, a bolt that could be slid home and twisted, fixed to the metal door and the concrete with bolts that looked like they could hold in Ahn-Kha.