Valentine's Rising

by E. E. Knight

  He pushed the general to the stairs and through the crash door at the bottom. As he slammed it behind them, he saw a shadow fly across the hallway and into the interrogation room. Mr. Smalls squealed—for the last time. Valentine shut the pathetically tiny bolt on the door.

  “A bodyguard went nuts! Fuckin’ tore everyone apart,” Valentine shouted upstairs, pushing the general up in front of him. “That Hood’s berserk.”

  An MP and another Quisling soldier stood at the top of the stairs, both pointing guns down at them.

  “General?” Valentine asked, putting Xray-Tango between him and the rifles, just in case.

  “Put up those guns, damn it. Run, run for it, boys. Or we’re all dead!” Xray-Tango shouted, which was probably true enough.

  Thank God!

  Valentine got the general to the top of the stairs as the MP ran. Valentine heard another door downstairs torn off its hinges. He heard the scream of some other unfortunate pulled from a hiding spot. Probably the MP. That was enough for the TMCC grunt at the stairs. He put up his rifle and ran for the door, with a convincing “Get out of here!”

  His example was one to be followed. The other officers and men made for the exits. One threw a chair out the window, and was about to follow it when a bullet whizzed by. One of the sentries outside, hearing shouts and confusion within, had shot in panic.

  “What the—?” the private said.

  “Try the door,” Valentine suggested, grabbing his pistol belt and heading for the second story. “C’mon, General, let’s call for help,” he said, waving the pistol to point upstairs. Valentine smashed a red case on the wall and extracted the fire ax from within.

  Either he was moving fast or the general was slow; it seemed an eternity until they came through the door to the radio room on the second floor. The rest of the floor was a cavern of future construction. Two operators stood next to the radios, both armed and pointing their weapons at Valentine and Xray-Tango. A trio of message tubes stood up from the floor like unfinished plumbing fixtures.

  “Fuck! FUCK! Hold it right there, mister,” the radioman with sergeant’s stripes said, eyes bulging at the sight of the blood on Valentine.

  “Holy shit,” the other added, shaking like he had a jack-hammer in his hand instead of a revolver.

  “Watch those weapons there, soldiers,” Xray-Tango said.

  “I’m the only one who made it out,” Valentine said. “If I were you two, I’d get gone. It’s a bodyguard. It’s going nuts.”

  “Jesus, that happened to my cousin in Armarillo,” the shaking one said. “Like it got ravies. It killed thirty people before they stopped it.”

  “If you’ve got a way out of here that doesn’t involve the stairs, I’d use it,” Valentine said. “We’ll call for help.”

  “It’s my responsibility,” Xray-Tango said, his eye twitching madly and the words barely getting out. “Run along, boys.”

  The men heard a crash below and decided they knew a sensible order when they heard it. They scrambled out the window and dropped to the ground below.

  Valentine offered Xray-Tango the ax handle. “You want the honors?”

  “Sorry, Le Sain, or whoever you are. I was true to you, best as I could be. You weren’t straight with me.”

  “Could I have been?”

  “That’s a ‘what-if.’ I don’t like to waste time with ‘what-ifs. ’ I’m no renegade. I can’t let you smash the radio. The only other unit strong enough to send for help is at the quartermaster office at MacArthur Park, down by the warehouses, and if you smash that one too, no one will get here in time. Assuming you cut the field-phone lines north on the bridge, and south on the poles, that is.”

  Valentine shared a smile with his former superior.

  There was a scream from downstairs.

  “Sorry, General,” Valentine said. He swung the ax handle, connecting solidly with Xray-Tango’s temple. He reversed the grip and, with three precise blows, left the radio in pieces.

  Valentine hid behind rolls of weatherproofing, ax across his lap, lowering his lifesign. He pulled inward, concentrating on a point six inches in front of his nose, taking it down, down, down . . .

  He became a prowling cat, a hiding mouse, a buzzing fly. A pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas. The Reaper came up and took in the ruins of the radio room. It hissed and picked up the general like a distracted parent lifting a child’s dropped doll.

  “general! general! wake! wake and tell what has passed.”

  Xray-Tango gave a moan as the creature shook him.

  Valentine couldn’t let the Reaper go to the window, see the men streaming out of his camp. He couldn’t risk a single footstep behind him. It would mean a leap. He gathered himself, and readied the ax.

  Even with its attention on Xray-Tango, it felt him coming. It was full night, when a Reaper’s senses and reflexes become unholy. Valentine still buried the blade of the ax in its side, missing the great nerve trunks running up its spine. It dropped Xray-Tango.

  “Melted butter,” Xray-Tango murmured. At least that’s what it sounded like to Valentine.

  “you!” the Reaper spat.

  Valentine fired Xray-Tango’s gun into it, but he might as well have been throwing spitballs. It sprang.

  He ducked, so fast that the air whistled as he cut through it. The Reaper sailed head-first into the framework of a wall, crashing through two-by-fours into the next room. Valentine ran, throwing himself out the window like a swimmer off the block. He jackknifed in midair, landing lightly, but his bad leg betrayed him and he sprawled into the dirt.

  It flew out the window after him, ax-pinioned cape flapping like some hideous bat as it descended in a long parabola to the ground. It landed between him and the Ruins.

  They faced each other. Valentine drew his .45.

  “C’mon, you bastard,” Valentine said, sighting on its yellow eyes.

  It turned, looking over its shoulder. Valentine saw a hint of movement among the ruins and flung himself sideways.

  A blast from the PPD illuminated Ahn-Kha’s gargoyle features; the gun’s rattle was music to his ears. The bullets caught the Reaper as it spun, knocking it to the ground. It tried to rise, but Ahn-Kha flattened it with another burst as the Grog took a step forward. Valentine rose, hand on the hilt of General Hamm’s knife. Ahn-Kha stood, ten feet away from the crawling monstrosity, drum-magazined gun to his shoulder. He loosed another long burst, emptying the weapon. He lowered it, smoke pouring from the barrel filling the air with the peppery smell of cordite.

  But the Reaper still lived. Valentine came up with the knife, pressed its head to the ground with his foot, and swung for all he was worth. The blade went in deep, severing its spine. The Reaper’s limbs gave one jumping-frog spasm and went limp. Valentine pulled the blade out before the black tar clogging the wound could glue it in place like the ax head in its side.

  Valentine kicked over the body as Ahn-Kha put a new drum on the gun. The Reaper’s eyes were still alive with malice.

  “Mu-Kur-Ri,” Valentine said into the still-functioning eyes, for the Reaper’s head still lived and could still pass on what it sensed to the Master Kurian at the other end. “The Dau’weem sent me to kill you. My name is David Valentine. I come for you now.”

  The Reaper tried to say something but Valentine swung again. The blade bit deep; the head separated. He picked it up by the wispy hair and sent it flying off into the darkness. He pitied the rat that might taste the flesh.

  “Neither of us remembered to bring a spear,” Valentine said. “We’re a pair of idiots.”

  Valentine’s eyes picked up a Quisling soldier or two, watching them from hiding spots. “The headquarters is clear,” Valentine shouted at one. “The general’s hurt. Call the medics. There might still be someone alive in the basement.” He clapped his hands. “Hustle, hustle!”

  The soldier scampered off.

  “Let’s go,” he said to Ahn-Kha.

  They trotted into
the Ruins and circled around to the road paralleling the communications lines. Valentine surveyed the line of wires until he found the utility pole he wanted.

  “Those are the field-phone lines south. Gimme that sling. I’ll cut these; you’ll need to do the ones at the railroad bridge. Flare gun, please.”

  “I can guess which one you want in it,” Ahn-Kha said, slipping the flare inside and handing it to him. “I agree. It will be glorious, even if it fails.”

  Valentine attached the PPD strap to his waist after wrapping it around the pole. Using his claws, he shimmied up the pole easily enough. There was a crossbar for him to sit on at the top. There, four communications lines and one power line shared space on the pole. Careful to avoid the last, he took out General Hamm’s light infantry machete and shoved the first phone line into the notch. He used the utility crossbeam as a leaver. Twang—it parted with a push. Valentine looked again at the knife, smiling wryly.

  “Nice work, Hamm.”

  The other lines were easily severed. Ahn-Kha watched the road, ears twitching.

  Valentine looked around at New Columbia from his pole-top perch. Here and there he picked out his companies, the red tape hung across their bodies muted in the dark but identifiable, moving silently toward their objectives. They’d been told to say their orders were to reinforce the guards at the vital spots: warehouses, dock, bridge, rail yard, prison camp. With all the confusion in the night, Valentine felt they would have a good chance of being believed. Searchlights were lit at the Kurian Tower, probing the darkness around the Tower as guards deployed to hardpoints and Mu-Kur-Ri braced for his coming. At the prison camp, a hand-cranked siren wailed as the guards turned out. He saw truck headlights descending the winding road from Pulaski Heights. The Kurian had already sent for help.

  Valentine cocked the flare gun. He looked down at Ahn-Kha. The Grog knew enough human gestures to give him a thumbs-up. He fired the pistol; the flare shot into the air with a sound like a cat spitting. The parachute opened and the signal drifted, a bright green star slowly descending, pushed by a wind from the southwest.

  It sparked and sputtered across the sky on March 21, 2071, at 23:28—Captain Moira Styachowski made a note of the flare’s time in her order journal. Valentine’s Rising had begun.

  Chapter Nine

  New Columbia, March of the forty-eighth year of the Kurian Order: Risings. Widespread revolts in the Kurian Zone are rare, successful ones are exponentially rarer. While a number of the Freeholds of 2071 can trace their origins to uprisings against the New Order in the first decade of Kurian rule, since that turbulent period examples of large-scale rebellion hardly exist. The few exceptions succeeded only in cases of geographical isolation i.e. the Juneau Insurrection along the islands and coastline of southeastern Alaska and the more recent Jamaican revolt, or small populations on the fringes of the Freeholds who manage to hold out long enough for help to arrive: Quebec City, the Laramie Mountains, Las Cruces. Stacked against those few successes are the legendary slaughters at Charleston and the Carolina Coast, the Dallas Corridor, Cleveland, and Point Defiance between Mobile and Biloxi. Ten times that number as bloody, but not as famous because of the lack of surviving chronicles, could easily be named. Then there are hundreds, if not thousands, of small actions, where individual groups of desperate sufferers on a city block or two, at a collective farm, or within a factory managed to wrestle the weapons out of their keepers’ hands and go down fighting. Sadly, we know virtually none of these stories beyond a faded scribble of names on a wall or a brief radio transmission like a cry for help in a ghetto night.

  Whether it’s two men with pistols or twenty thousand with a city, the Kurians are masters of suppressing risings. Even if one Kurian principality falls, the six surrounding immediately invade, with the twin goals of preventing the revolutionary virus from spreading and claiming new feeding grounds for members of their own hierarchy. Quisling soldiers know there are brass rings and ten-year exemptions to be won in putting down revolts; their vengeance is all the more brutal when they see their comrades strung up or lying in piles against execution walls. The Reapers return in an orgy of feeding. The aftermath is shown through slide shows at New Universal Church lectures and becomes the subject of homilies about the futility and madness of violence.

  But while the flame of revolt burns, it burns brightly, fed by the liberated energy of the human spirit. Now it takes the form of a green flare falling slowly toward the center of Little Rock.

  By the time Valentine got to the bottom of the pole the flare had returned to earth. Its green glow pulsed from behind a pile of debris-flattened automobiles stacked like rusty pancakes.

  “This is it, old horse. I’ll see you on the other side.”

  “My platoon has a good sergeant. Let me come with you.”

  “I’ll be able to do this a lot better if I know you’re waiting at the station. Otherwise I’ll spend the next two hours worrying about what’s happening on that hill. Get out of here.”

  “Until we meet again, my David . . . in this world or the next.” They clasped each other’s forearms in the Grog handshake.

  “Arou ng’nan,” Valentine said. Every language has a form of “good luck,” though the Grog form was a little more prosaic, hoping that spirit-fathers would intercede on one’s side.

  They trotted off in opposite directions. Valentine stayed clear of the road, tracing the route out to the edge of the Kurian Tower that he had walked while forming his plans. The foundation of the tower and the construction grounds around it were floodlit, and searchlights from strongpoints atop the first story probed the night.

  Nail and five of his six Bears were crouching in the cover of a filled-in cellar. Valentine looked at the faces above the guns pointed at him. The Bears’ Quisling uniforms lay in a pile that smelled of kerosene. The Bears didn’t need black T-shirts or red sashes. They were in their battle gear, the savage-looking Bear mélange of Reaper cloth, leather, combat vests, fur and Kevlar. Rain cradled a combat shotgun in chain-mail-backed leather gloves. Another Bear Valentine knew vaguely as Hack wore a massive girdle with Reaper teeth fitted into the leather. He held a machine pistol in one hand and one of Ahn-Kha’s Quickwood spears in the other, its end decorated with eagle feathers like a Comanche war lance. Red, whose freckled face narrowed and ended in a jaw so sharp it looked like it could split logs, had Reaper scalps—at least Valentine hoped they were Reaper scalps—at his shoulder blades and elbows. More strings of black hair hung from the belt-fed machine gun so tied to his combat harness that it looked like part of him. Lost&Found had a shining cross over his heart and Brass, almost as wide as he was high, had painted his face so it resembled a skull. A red-eyed plastic snake head had been slipped over the mouth of his grenade launcher, and he’d wrapped the butt and grips with snakeskin and painted “The Fire Dragon” on the side of the support weapon.

  “Where’s Groschen?”

  “He’s got the Grog gun, forward. We like to have a good sniper ready when we go in.”

  “Signal him to pull back. I’m aborting this.”

  Nail exchanged looks with another Bear. “But the green flare—”

  “We’re still throwing the dice for Boxcars. We aren’t going to hit the tower. I got an opportunity to throw a scare into Mu-Kur-Ri. He’s protecting his precious aura with everything he’s got. Going in there with some kind of surprise is one thing. Breaking down that door into the teeth of six or seven Reapers, and troops besides—I won’t do it. In five more minutes there’ll be troops from Pulaski Heights here. We’d have as much trouble getting out as going in.”

  “You’re the boss,” Nail said. He looked up and out of the basement and made a buzzing sound. “Damn, we’re almost in spitting distance of that bas—Groschen’s pulling back, he’ll be here in two minutes.”

  “Very good, Lieutenant.”

  “Sir, you look like hell.”

  “I feel like it, Nail.”

  The men got to their feet, slinging their we
apons. One gathered up the kerosene-soaked clothes.

  “Why are you bringing those?” Valentine asked.

  “A little ceremony,” Nail said. “We’ll save it for another day.”

  Groschen, now clean-shaven, returned to the basement, the long Grog gun over his shoulders. “The tower’s off. Hope you aren’t bleeding yet,” Nail explained.

  “No, suh.”

  “You may still get to do it tonight. They sounded the alarm over at the prison yard.”

  Valentine checked their line of retreat and led them out of the basement. When they were clear of the tower’s sight-lines, Valentine gathered the Bears.

  “Keep back about thirty feet. I like to be able to listen.”

  They cut through the Ruins, zigzagging around the graveyard of a civilization. They struck another field-phone line, strung on four-foot posts, and cut it. As they neared the road to the prison camp Valentine heard a mass of men moving away from the prison yard. Had they stormed it bloodlessly?

  Lieutenant Zhao led his men up the road, away from the camp, in files at each side of the road. The men looked spooked. Valentine thought it best to call out from cover.

  “Lieutenant Zhao. It’s Valentine.”

  Zhao waved his right hand like he was wiping a table. The men crouched from the front of the lines and rolling backward, like rows of dominoes tumbling.

  “Valentine who?” Zhao said. His hair was unkempt, his face was pitted from acne and he wore filthy glasses, but the only thing lacking in him as an officer was experience. Valentine had learned he was smart, hardworking and organized, which had led him to give him a company. But he’d evidently lost his head.

  “Captain Valentine. Careful with the guns, men,” Valentine said, stepping out from the rubble.

  “Sir, did the Kurian go down?”

  “I called it off. What happened at the camp?”

  “The guard-tower had a machine gun for covering the yard,” Zhao explained. “They slung it around and started shooting. Maybe they have night vision gear. We didn’t go any farther. There’s no cover for a hundred yards around the wire. I didn’t want to risk those kind of casualties.”