Valentine's Rising

by E. E. Knight

  They splashed up an icy stream, startling a pair of ducks into flight. If the freezing water hurt the Grog’s long-toed feet, he gave no indication.

  Valentine heard a distant shot from the direction of Post’s group.

  “Stop,” he told Ahn-Kha.

  Ahn-Kha took two more steps, and placed Valentine on a flat-topped rock midstream.

  “You need a rest?” Ahn-Kha asked, blowing.

  “I heard a shot.”

  “Maybe a signal?”

  “Or something else.”

  Only the running water, wind and an occasional bird could be heard in the Arkansas pines and hardwoods. Ahn-Kha shivered. Valentine saw a fallen log upstream, felled by erosion so that it lay like a ramp up the riverbank.

  “Let’s cut back. Carefully.”

  It was Tayland. His eyes were shut, and he had the strangely peaceful look of the recently dead.

  They’d just left him in the woods on his litter, wrapped in blankets that would soon be disturbed by birds or coyotes, a bullet hole dead center in his chest. The tracks said that a group of men and dogs had turned after Jefferson, but no one had bothered to follow the lone Grog.

  As he said a few words of prayer over the deceased, Valentine remembered Tayland, wounded as they fled the ambush at Bern Woods, cutting the horse free from the traces of a teammate with a big bowie knife. He rooted around at the man’s waist, and freed the knife and its scabbard.

  The blade was sticky with its owner’s blood.

  “Shall we bury him?” Ahn-Kha asked.

  “No. They might send a party back to get the body. You never know.”

  “The tracks lead back to town,” Ahn-Kha observed. A wide trail showed that men walked to either side of the short-stepping prisoners. They’d probably put them in shackles.

  Valentine nodded into the big, enquiring eyes and the pair turned to follow the trail.

  If it weren’t for the winter drizzle, the rider would have raised dust. Valentine watched him come into Bern Woods from the north, long coat flapping to the thunderous syncopation of his lathered mount’s hooves. He clutched mane and reigns in his right hand, leaning far over his horse’s neck so his left could wave a red-and-white-striped gusset above him, hallooing all the way.

  Valentine waited and watched the guards in the south-gate tower smoke cigarettes. He felt strangely uneasy in his hiding place, near the foundation of a flattened house outside of town where he stowed his .45 automatic and clothes. He was concealed well enough, under a sheet-sized length of old carpet, planted with mud, leaves and twigs. He had used the carapace to crawl at a turtle’s pace from the ruin.

  It took only fifteen minutes of the forty or so before sunset for them to ride out again. The messenger trotted a new horse at the head of two clattering diesel pickups, beds loaded with support-weapons men, and tracking dogs riding in baskets tied to the cabin roofs. Behind the oil-burners a column of twos streamed out of Bern Woods, their horses tripping in the winter ruts of the broken road. Then a final figure appeared. Valentine drew an anxious breath. A Reaper. It strode out in a meter-eating quick-march, booted feet a blur under heavy cape and cowl.

  The final figure explained his uneasiness while waiting. Something about a Reaper’s presence gave him what an old tent-mate from the Wolves had called the “Valentingle.” At times it was so bad the hair on the back of his neck stood straight out, or it could manifest as a cold, dead spot in his mind. It was a capricious talent; he’d once walked over a Reaper lying hidden in a basement without a hint of it, but in another time and place he’d felt one on top of a hill a mile away. The Reapers, the praetorian guard doing the bloody work of Earth’s Kurian Order that raised, and devoured, his species like cattle, had the ability too. They could sense humans through night and fog, rain or snow. Only through special training could men hide their presence; training that he had started when he was nineteen, seven long years ago. Since the ambush he’d—

  Stop it. Since the ambush, regrets about his misjudgments while bringing his convoy home, his eagerness to turn the men and material over to the first Southern Command uniform he saw, had tormented him hourly, and he clenched his fists in frustration until bruises appeared in his palms. Valentine called himself back to the outskirts of Bern Woods and watched the column disappear up the old highway.

  Ahn-Kha must have hit the bridge post. They had scouted the blockhouses to either end of the old concrete bridge—it turned out only one was occupied; three soldiers that hardly qualified for a corporal’s guard—and Valentine told Ahn-Kha to pick off a man or two from the distance with his Grog gun an hour before sunset, before heading toward Tayland’s body. The bridge was only a mile north of Bern Woods; they’d call for help from there.

  His part was more of a challenge. After changing clothes in a lonely, recently abandoned farmhouse—he’d found a suitably smelly set of overalls, a knit coat and a shapeless woolen winter cap, and muddied his boots sufficiently so they wouldn’t be an instant giveaway—he kept the snakeskin bandolier, wrapping it about his waist beneath the overalls. He wanted to be within the palisade around the old border-town before nightfall. Once in, he would have to evaluate which options were likely, which were possible, and which were madness.

  He started a cautious creep toward the wall, down a ditch beside what had once been a short road heading west out of town, still beneath his moldering carapace. Even after he was out of sight of the guard-tower he stayed in the ditch. He abandoned the carpet while still away from the wall, since a patrol would find it more suspicious up close than abandoned in the field.

  Boarded-up windows and corrugated aluminum nailed over doors faced him from the backs of what had been the main street of the town. Many of the little roadside towns in the borderlands of the Ozark Free Territory were like this, walling the spaces between buildings with wire-topped timber blocking any ingress other than the gate; what had been a sleepy rural town was now a frontier fort.

  It went dark with the suddenness of a clouded winter night. Valentine’s night vision took over—another biological modification, courtesy of the Lifeweavers, the ancient enemies and blood relations of Earth’s new masters. Colors muted but edge details stood out. The grain of the wall and blades of tired winter grasses formed their delicate patterns on his enhanced retinas. Valentine’s nose picked up the town’s evening aromas of wood smoke, coal smoke, tobacco, cooking and outdoor toilets. The last was especially noticeable, as his ditch served as an open-air septic tank at the end of a pipe running from under the wall. He slunk up on the sluice that served as the town’s sewer from downwind. If a dog patrol came, there was a chance that the odor would mask his.

  Valentine examined the sewer-pipe. The PVC plastic was not something he could wiggle through, but rainwater making its way into the ditch had opened a gap under that part of the wall. Child-sized hand- and footprints ringed the gap. He smelled and listened for a moment, then crawled for the break.

  If he was lucky—which he hadn’t been since leaving the piney woods of Texas, admittedly—the garrison of Bern Woods would be short enough on pairs of eyes that it would be all they could do to keep the gate, prison and tower manned.

  Waiting had never gained him much, so he stuck his head under the gap. The sluice stood next to what looked to have been a chicken takeout, the remnants of its friendly red-and-yellow decor incongruous next to the Fort Apache palisade.

  He drew Tayland’s bowie knife and wiggled through. The fighting knife was the only weapon he carried. Being gunless kept him cautious and alert. It might also buy him a little time if he were captured. The only people allowed to carry guns in the Kurian Zone were those who worked for the regime; a quick harvesting in the grasp of the Reapers was the usual punishment for anyone else found with a firearm.

  The town wasn’t electrified at the moment. Valentine saw a few lanterns and marked the faint glow of candlelight from the upper stories of the buildings on the main street. He smelled diesel and heard a generator clatterin
g some distance away to the south. Following his ears, he saw drums in a fenced-in enclosure next to a shed behind a stoutly built building.

  Valentine got away from the wall as quickly as he could. The town seemed empty. He untied his long hair and mussed it with his fingers so it covered the scar on the side of his face, and pulled the hat down to his eyebrows. He took a slow walk toward the highway cutting the town in two, turning onto the main street at a gas station whose garage now sheltered broken-down horses instead of broken-down cars. He recognized the horse that had been dragging Tayland in an oil-change bay.

  In the Kurian Zone you had to walk a fine line between looking like you were busy and drawing attention to yourself. He walked purposefully toward the one building lit with electricity.

  A feed store still held feed, by the look of it, but the drug and sundry had been recently boarded up.

  The brightly lit building turned out to be the town bank, complete with drive-thru teller, though it had become an antique store sometime before the cataclysm of 2022, judging from an old, rain-washed sign painted where once tellers had stood behind armored glass to service cars. Blue banners, with three gold stars set in a horizontal white stripe, hung from the flagpole next to the door of the bank/antique shop. A painted sign jutting from a pile of whitewashed rocks announced its latest incarnation: Station 46. Red-painted gallows stood just a few steps from the headquarters at what had been an intersection, dominating the central street like a grim plaza statue. There was no trapdoor, just a pair of poles and a crossbeam.

  A tall sentry with a forehead that bore an imprint where it might have been kicked by a horse’s hoof stood to one side of the door. Another man, proportionally older and rounder, sat in an ornate rocking chair with a shotgun across his lap. His sideburns were russet, but the sparse hair streaming out from under a pisscutter cap was gray. Both wore khaki uniforms with brown leather pads at the knees, shoulders and elbows, though the seated one had lieutenant’s bars and a more elaborate uniform.

  “Is this Station 46?” Valentine drawled, head tilted to match the poor leveling of the sign’s face.

  “Goddammit, seems like every day I hear that,” the older man screeched. “The friggin’ sign is out there, plain as paint, everything but a spotlight on it. But still I hear ‘Is this Station 46?’ from some shitheel six times a week and twice on Sundays. Never fails.”

  “So this is Station 46?” Valentine asked.

  The aged lieutenant turned even redder. “Yes, dammit! This is Station 46.”

  “I’m to speak to the commanding officer.”

  “He ain’t here, boy. I mean, that’s me, seeing as he’s out. Whatever the question is, the answer is ‘no.’ Now get going before I jail you for breaking curfew, you dunk.”

  Valentine was happy to swallow the abuse, as long as the lieutenant stayed angry.

  “I was told by one of your officers to speak to the commanding officer, Station 46. That’s what I’m here to do, sir.”

  The lieutenant leaned forward in his rocking chair. “What about?”

  “My boy’s watchin’ two pen of hawgs bit north of here, ’round Blocky Swamp. There’s a lot less hawgs in those pens thanks to some sergeant with a uniform like yours. He didn’t pass any scrips or warrants, just took ’em. He told me if I had a problem with it to speak to the officer commanding, Station 46, Bern Woods. Walked all day, practically, as I do have a problem with someone just takin’ my stock.”

  “What the crap, dunk? Haven’t you heard yet? There’s been some changes, boy. Southern Command’s not riding ’round handing out scrip no more. That’s all over and out.”

  Valentine widened his stance.

  “I don’t fight these wars, or know about it from nothing, and I keep my boys outta it too. I’m short salt and flour and sugar; thought I’d pick some up and catch up on the news after Christmas. But being short hawgs now too, I thought a trip to town was in order. I want to write on some papers and make a complaint.”

  “A complaint? A complaint?”

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  The old man wavered in perplexity, then looked at Valentine sidelong, under lowered lids, like a bull trying to make up its mind whether to charge or run.

  “I’ll take your statement,” he said. “I don’t expect you’ll get the answer you’re looking for, but I warned ya fair.”

  “Thanks. Would’ve saved us both some time if you’d done so in the first place,” Valentine said.

  The older man snorted and led him inside the command post. He held the door open for Valentine with a grin, and Valentine suddenly liked the aged lieutenant a little better, and hoped it wouldn’t come to killing.

  Little remnants of both the banking heritage and retail life of the building remained in the form of a vault and stock tables. Valentine looked inside the vault, where arms and boxes of ammunition stood in disarray from the hurried muster he had seen ride out of town. A few footlockers and gun cases with Southern Command notations on them huddled in a corner as though frightened of the new pegs and racks. Opposite the vault a row of rooms held prisoners, confined behind folding metal gates like those used to protect urban merchants’ streetside windows from burglars. Valentine counted the men, his heart shrinking three sizes when he recognized their faces. Eleven remaining marines from the Thunderbolt sat in the bare, unlit cells—pictures of grubby despair. Post and the two Jamaicans occupied another cell. Two more, in Texan clothes, shared another; Jefferson passed him a hint of a shrug—he had dried blood from a cut lip in his beard. The other was a drover named Wilson. Guilt pulled at him with an iron hook. The marines took in Valentine with darting eyes but said nothing. The surviving teamster ignored him.

  Valentine heard a hoot, and turned his head to see a pair of Grogs in loincloths. Simpler, shorter versions of the Golden One known as Grey Ones, they bore brooms and dustpans, cleaning rags and wood oil. They were the last of Ahn-Kha’s team, the lucky pair who had made it all the way to Haiti and back. Not bright enough to understand Valentine’s disguise, they chattered in excitement at his familiar face. Valentine took a step back.

  “Hell, those things give me the creeps. You got them in town?” Valentine asked, feigning fright.

  The Grogs gamboled up to him, hooting. Valentine put a long table between him and the excited pair.

  “Must be the smell of pigs,” the temporary commander mused. He pushed the Grogs off.

  “Don’t let ’em touch me,” Valentine said. The fear in his voice was real enough. If the officer decided to point the shotgun and start asking questions, there wasn’t much he could do.

  “What’s all d’excitement?” a musical voice asked, coming from the hallway behind the Grogs.

  Valentine looked down at Narcisse. She was uninjured—assuming one didn’t count the missing legs and left hand, old souvenirs of her escape attempts on Santo Domingo—and dressed in her customary colorful rags and bandannas. She “walked” by swinging her body on her handless arm, using the limb as a crutch. An accomplished cook was welcome in any army, and she’d been put to work, judging from the aluminum dish gripped in her good hand. Valentine’s sensitive nose detected the aromas of hot peppers and thyme in the steaming mixture of pork and rice. Narcisse looked once at Valentine, and then turned to the officer, pivoting on her left arm like a ballet dancer on pointe.

  The Grogs forgot Valentine at the smell of food.

  “You ready to eat, Cap’n? Extra spicy, just like you asked.”

  The older man’s nostrils widened. “Sure am.” He picked up a yellowed piece of blank paper and a pencil, and handed them to Valentine. “Get lost, boy. Write down your complaint, then give it back to me.”

  “This isn’t official; it doesn’t have a seal,” Valentine said.

  “There’s enough for your friend, Cap’n. He looks hungry.”

  He glowered down on Narcisse. “You’re supposed to feed officers first, then the men, and the prisoners long way last. He can try for a meal at the church
hall.”

  “Yes, Cap’n. Sorry, mister, I just do what I’m told. Thank you, Cap’n.”

  Valentine picked up the pencil. “Can I write this in here where there’s light?”

  “As long as you shut up and stay out of my way, you can do what you like.”

  Narcisse filled the officer’s plate, and brought out a plastic water jug with a cup rattling on the nozzle. “You want me to take some to the boys in the tower, Cap’n?”

  “No, they’re on duty. We’re short men with the Visor out with the riders.”

  “Yes, Cap’n. Apple cider?” For someone with only one hand, Narcisse acted the part of a servant with skill.

  “There’s some left? Sure. This is some fine spicy. I’m from Dallas, and I’ll tell you that this is good cooking.”

  “Thank you, Cap’n.”

  The officer, who never corrected her when she called him “Cap’n,” even ate with the shotgun in his lap. Valentine looked at the service pips on his sleeve, wondering why a man with so many years was just a lieutenant, and a junior one at that. Valentine wrote out his phony story in scraggly block capitals. The wall above him was festooned with wanted posters and poorly reproduced photos, perhaps a hundred in all. “Terrorism” and “Sabotage” looked to be the two most common crimes, though “Speculation” appeared on some. He recognized one face: Brostoff, a hard-drinking lieutenant he had served with six years ago when he ran with the Wolves of Zulu Company. There was a four-year bounty on him. Just beneath Brostoff was a half-familiar face; Valentine had to look a second time to be sure. A handsome young black man looked into the camera with calm, knowing eyes. Frat—listed in the handbill as F. Carlson—had a ten-year bounty on him for assassination and sabotage. Frat would be about twenty now, Valentine calculated. He’d last seen him when he brought Molly back to the Free Territory and reunited her with her family, when the youth was serving his term as an aspirant prior to becoming a Wolf.

  Valentine watched Narcisse sneak a few spoonfuls out to the guard on duty, but when she stumped her way over to the men in the cells, the lieutenant growled at her. As she turned away from the prisoners’ outstretched arms she gave Valentine a significant wink.