by E. E. Knight
Valentine didn’t listen. There was a problem with the smoke. It didn’t smell like anything. Smoke also didn’t make noise as it crawled along the ceiling.
“One got away,” Valentine hissed. “A Kurian. It’s heading back down the tunnel.”
Without further explanation he threw himself down the tunnel. In the distance he saw a faint figure, running for its immortal life. The Kurian could move. Not as fast as a Reaper. Nothing that wasn’t engine-powered moved as fast as a Reaper.
It dashed through the door of the utility subbasement, Valentine almost on its heels. Its skin was the color of blue ice and it gave off a sickly sweet odor like marigolds. So intent on the chase was he that he bounced off the chest of the Reaper, which stepped out from behind the steaming boiler like a sliding steel door. The Kurian was safely behind it. The Kurian turned, looked at Valentine with red-black eyes, and then disappeared upstairs.
Valentine rolled backward and came to his feet.
The one-armed Reaper’s eyes wandered. It extended its remaining clawed hand and pulled one of the boiler pipes free of its mount. Valentine heard the Reaper’s skin sizzle against the hot metal, but the thing didn’t even wince. It yanked the pipe out, so a firehose of steam flooded the passageway and the stairway behind it.
Then it advanced on Valentine.
“i know you,” it hissed. “our false friend from louisiana.”
“Valentine!” Nail shouted from behind him.
Valentine dropped to the ground. A hail of bullets filled the tunnel. The Reaper’s face vanished in the tight pattern of a buckshot blast. It roared, and charged down the tunnel toward the sound of gunfire. With its eyes gone, it didn’t see Valentine wriggling forward after Mu-Kur-Ri.
He heard fighting behind. Styachowski and Nail should be able to handle a one-armed, blind Reaper without him. He wanted Mu-Kur-Ri.
But the hissing steam blocked his way. There was nothing to do but . . . do it.
Valentine lifted his combat vest and got his head and arms tucked into as much of the material as he could, and held it closed over his face.
“This is for you, Hank,” he muttered to himself. He took a deep breath; it wouldn’t be pleasant to breathe in hot steam.
Later, when he’d forgotten the pain, he examined the burn marks in detail using a pair of mirrors. His lower back took the worst of it, from beneath his rib cage—where the combat vest ended—to the line of his camp shorts. That part must have been hit by steam shooting from the hose, and it turned into a girdle of scar tissue. The back of his legs got it badly enough that the hair only regrew irregularly, but there was less scarring there than above the line of his shorts. The thick cotton of the shorts and combat vest kept the rest of the damage to first- and second-degree burns. Painful enough, but they healed.
The pain drove him on instinct through the steam and up the stairs. He caught up to the Kurian and fell on it like a rabid dog. It squealed rabbitlike as he tore into the slippery mass with fists and teeth. Cartilage crunched under his knees, a pulpy mass of digestive organs slipped wetly through his fingers, then its rubbery skull finally gave out as he slammed it again and again and again into the concrete landing, still shrouded in green smoke. Then he collapsed atop the spongy corpse of Mu-Kur-Ri.
As he passed out he thought of Caroline Smalls.
The next thing he saw was Styachowski’s face, gently rocking as it floated above him. A pleasant warmth gave way to pain, agonizing pain, pain like he’d never felt and would shoot himself to keep from feeling again. It was so bad he couldn’t summon the energy to do more than whimper, his body paralyzed, living only in the endless moment of the burn’s agony.
Think of something, anything, anything to drive the pain away!
“They think of a name for you?” Valentine croaked.
“Not yet,” Styachowski said. She’d shoved expended cartridge cases into her nostrils to stop the flow of blood.
Nail patted her shoulder. “You did just fine, you’re a Bear to be proud of. How about Ursa? Like the stars?”
“Wildcat?” Valentine said. “No. A woman who can be anything. A Wildcard.”
“I like Wildcard,” Styachowski said.
“No, if you like it, we can’t use it. Unwritten law,” Rain said.
Valentine turned painfully to Nail. “Make it an order, Lieutenant.”
The Bear shrugged. “After all this,” Nail said, “it seems we should call you whatever you like, Styachowski. Wildcard it is. The drawn card that turned out to be an ace just when we needed it.”
“Wildcard, is he alive?” a voice that might have been Nail’s said.
“He’s alive.”
It was torture to his skin to be lifted and carried. Sensibly, his consciousness fled.
He later heard about the scattering of troops from the Kurian Tower as Reapers ran amok, and the confusion that allowed Lieutenant Nail to carry him and lead the Bears back to the river, and how Lost&Found swam across with Valentine tied to an empty five-gallon jerrican to keep him afloat. As he heard the tale Valentine felt as though he’d lived it, but couldn’t remember much except for vague impressions of floating. He rememberd shelling but no further large-scale attacks, just endless probes. He remembered Post’s daily reports of units observed moving east through New Columbia, and the gun resting in the swimming pool running out of ammunition so that all the hilltop forces could do was watch. He remembered walking again, and giving up his bed to another wounded man and sleeping on a blanket on the concrete floor near where Narcisse worked the hospital kitchen and rubbed him with oily-smelling lotion.
Then came sounds of more trains in the distance and vehicular traffic around the base of the hill, and he managed to go outside. He’d meet the inevitable standing, even if he stood in bandages.
“Sir, you’re needed on the west side.” One of the pregnant women, in a man’s service poncho which gave her belly growing room, reported from her station at the field phone.
Valentine made a stiff-legged journey. His bad leg ached all the time now, throbbing in sympathy with the healing burns. Ahn-Kha helped him up a set of stairs and they reached the observation point, what was left of Solon’s grand balcony. Three soldiers knelt, sharing a set of binoculars, staring up the Arkansas River, a blue ribbon between the green Ozark hills.
“What in God’s name is that?” Valentine asked.
The river was three deep in beetles. A flotilla of craft, none larger than thirty feet. Many towed everything from rowboats to braces of canoes.
“Reinforcements?”
“Depends on your point of view. Look—the mortars are shooting at them.”
The tubes of Pulaski Heights were dropping shells into the mass of speeding boats, with little effect but wetting those inside.
Styachowski ran along the rubble-strewn base of Solon’s Residence beneath them, tripped over a log and sprawled flat. She picked herself up, but didn’t bother to wipe the mud from her chin.
“They’re pulling back, sir,” she called up, her voice squealing like a schoolgirl’s in excitement. “Not the boats, the Quislings. They’re coming off the hill.”
“To oppose the landing?”
“They’re just running,” Styachowski said. “Running like hell for the bridge. A train just pulled out east, packed with men.”
Valentine looked down the river, caught a familiar pattern. He snatched the binoculars out of the hand of the man next to him without apology, and focused on the boat trailing the leadmost pilot vessel. There was a flagstaff above the outboard motors. The State Flag of Texas flapped in the breeze.
The boats were a surprise to the Quislings as well. They abandoned the weapons on the Pulaski Heights and fled with the rest toward Pine Bluff. When Valentine was sure the hilltop was clear he brought up the wounded from their dreadful holes into the fresh air and sunshine. There were the dead to be sorted from the living, and sent on to the swollen, shell-tossed graveyard.
The Texans found him among the corp
ses, burying his dead.
“That’s him. I met him in Texas,” he heard a voice say. Valentine looked up and saw a Ranger he recognized, Colorado. The youth’s shoulders had broadened, and what Valentine’s nose told him was that motor oil stained the Ranger’s uniform.
Colorado brought forward a bearded man. Valentine suspected that when the campaign started the colonel of the Texas Rangers was clean shaven.
“Nice to finally meet the famous Ghost,” the colonel, whose nametag read “Samoza,” said.
The idea of a famous Cat struck Valentine as a bit absurd, and he fought down a laugh. If his nerves gave way now he’d fall on the man, laughing or crying or confessing, and none were appropriate to the moment.
“We’ve come all the way from Fort Scott for you,” Samoza continued.
The words took their time in coming. Valentine’s shocked brain had to inspect each one as it came out.
“Thank you. Southern Command couldn’t even make it fifty miles,” Valentine managed, looking out over the graves.
“Southern Command opened the door for us. Archangel was a joint operation from the start. The Kurians sent troops up from Texas to take you boys down. We figured if they didn’t want it, we’d like it back. We got more besides.”
It all hit Valentine like a warm wave. Intellect gave way to pent-up emotion like the dike that had swallowed Styachowski, and he found himself shaking, with tears in his eyes. He hoped his brain remembered it all and would be able to sort it out later. “What’s that, sir?” he finally said.
“We linked up with Southern Command just outside Hope. Ironic, wouldn’t you say? Then it was north into Oklahoma, and down the river to you.”
“What made you come all this way?”
“A Ranger teamster named Jefferson made a lot of noise in East Texas. Claimed we had to go help the man who started it all. He fought alongside us all the way to Fort Scott and lost a leg there to shellfire. Haven’t taken it yet but figured it could wait. You couldn’t.”
Valentine held out his hand to the colonel.
“You came all this way for a few companies of men?”
“We’re from Texas, friend. We remember the Alamo.”
Chapter Eleven
The Saint Francis River, August of the forty-eighth year of the Kurian Order: The land was healing with the people. In the weeks following the relief of the Razors at New Columbia, even Fort Scott changed hands yet again, to the combined forces of the Ozark Free Territory and the Texas Republic. Solon and his Kurian Council collapsed like a house of cards, fleeing in all directions. There were losses, irreplaceable losses, everywhere across the fought-over land. In the chaos in the Missouri Valley Grogs pushed south and the Kur in Kansas took a piece of the Ozarks around the lakes, and sent their Reapers into the Mark Twain Forest.
But the leaders of the newly wedded Texas and Ozark Free Territories would have something to say about that, in time. They controlled an area larger than any of the former states of the union.
David Valentine crossed the Free Territory with his pouch of Quickwood seeds. He planted one on a windswept hillside where a sergeant named Gator was buried. He placed another one outside a stoutly built barn near the Lousiana border—a crippled ex-Wolf named Gonzalez helped him relocate it, where a little patch of earth marked the location of the first man to die under Valentine’s command. A few frontier farmers turned up for the ceremony. In time, the locals called it Selby’s tree, and a Selby Meadows grew up around that barn. He placed a ring of Quickwood trees at the ambush site outside Post 46, just northeast of the Red River, another on a devastated riverbank that looked like a piece of the moon, where the Crocodile had moored, and the rest shaded a cemetery on Big Rock Hill.
The rest save one. He took it to the empty little village of Weening on the Saint Francis. The inhabitants were scattered, the Carlsons had vanished and Tank Bourne was laid out, months dead, in his cellar. Valentine buried him in the shade of a willow tree by the river, and up near the riverside gate he placed his last seed in the rich Arkansas soil, soil that had once soaked up Gabreilla Cho’s blood, and—though he did not know it—Molly Carlson’s tears.
There was already a pamphlet printed about the fight at Big Rock Hill. It was rolled up in Valentine’s bag next to his order book. He’d read a few pages—the author had relied on the collected radio reports from the hill for a day-by-day record of events, as interpreted for him by a decorated veteran of the Central Operational area named Captain Randolph—and given up after it described Lieutenant Colonel Kessey’s brilliant rising in the prison yards of New Columbia, when a Quisling division was put to flight by men keen on avenging their outraged women. He’d heard they were renaming the battlefield Kessey Heights, which was fine with him. Her body lay on it.
Folded into the pamphlet, for protection rather than as a book-mark, was a radiogram from Jamaica.
TO: DAVID VALENTINE, SOUTHERN COMMAND
FROM: COMMODORE HOUSE, JAMAICA
CHILD AMALEE BORN 7LBS6 JUNE 19 BOTH HEALTHY MOTHER SENDS LOVE CONGRATULATIONS JENSEN
The Quickwood tree would have a nice life ouside Weening. He found a boy from the Peterson family—they’d been the first to see the empty homes of Weening for the opportunity they presented and move the extended family there. The boy was eleven and watched him through wary but intelligent eyes. He seemed old enough for the responsibility of watching over the tree. Valentine didn’t want some clown clearing brush to cut down the Quickwood sapling.
Valentine tried to explain the importance of Quickwood to Mr. Peterson, but to the literal-minded man it came down to a tree that could grow a magic wooden stake that killed vampires. Valentine left it at that. There were things to do, so many things to do. Solon’s dream of owning the Mississippi and its tributaries vanished with the consul, but far-sighted men from Texas to the Ozarks might be able to bring the evil man’s idea to fruition—under new management, of course. Already there was talk of taking back New Orleans. Then the great gateway to the Caribbean would be open, a navy could be floated, and Southern Command would be able to put troops anywhere a keel could go.
And he could see his daughter.
Someday the Quickwood could be used properly. He’d returned to the Free Territory thinking the Haitian discovery would be a wedge he could drive into the heart of the Kurian Order, piercing it and breaking it up the way he did logs. But a wedge was only as good as the force driving it. All along, it had been cooperation between people, himself and Ahn-Kha, Styachowski and Post, Narcisse and Hank, Samoza and Jefferson, each doing their part in a whole that was even now being born.
How had the governor phrased it, after the formal military union of Texas and the Free Territory? “A new stake of freedom wedged between the Mississippi and the Gulag”? Something like that. Valentine liked to think of it as seed. A fast-growing seed, he hoped, and as deadly to the Kurian Order as the Quickwood he’d scattered over hundreds of square miles.
“Here you go, Gabby,” Valentine said, covering the seed with moist earth fresh from the river. He knelt at the nongrave. “Keep it safe for me. Something happened this summer. A miracle. We took the worst they could throw at us—ended up the stronger for it. The Texans have the Dallas Triangle ringed in now, and we’re sending captured artillery to finish the job. It’s only a matter of time. I’ve got a daughter, if you can believe it. And here I’ve planted my last seed. It’s a good day for me. It’s a new beginning for us.”
The future beckoned. The past, his regrets, his mistakes, all lay buried with the seed. No more looking back.
David Valentine glanced up at the hot noonday sun and wiped the sweat from his forehead, now beneath chin-length black hair, and wondered at the strange fate that saw him in the right place at the right time. Dreadful and deadly work still needed to be done, but it was work born of Hope.
Read on for a sneak peek at Valentine’s Exile, coming in hardcover from Roc in June 2006.
Dallas, March, the forty-ninth year of the Kur
ian Order: Four square miles of concrete and structural steel smoke and pop and sputter as the city dies from the stranglehold of a siege.
Street fighting isn’t so much seen as it is heard from a dozen different locations. Save for the sounds, a city at war seems strangely empty, save for scavenging black crows and wary, tail-tucking dogs. Vague rumbles like a distant storm mutter in the distance, or sudden eruptions of machine-gun fire from a few blocks away might be jackhammers breaking holes in a sidewalk in a more peaceful time. When men move, they move in a rush, pouring from doorways and crossing streets in a quick wave before the whine of shellfire can catch them in the open.
Valentine’s Razors’ regimental flag, a black-and-blue silhouette of an Arkansas razorback set under the joined Texas/Ozark flags, reads “Don’t Feed On Me,” though even a sharp-eyed youngster standing at the base of the Love Field control tower wouldn’t be able to read the letters even in the bright morning sun.
The Razors shouldn’t have worked. Soldiers thrown together under the most dire of circumstances, with unfamiliar corporals, sergeants, and officers putting together rifle platoons who had never trained together, couldn’t be expected to stand up to a determined assault, let alone hold a precarious position alone in the heart of enemy country. That their famous stand on the banks of the Arkansas River succeeded might be considered a measure of their enemy’s malice as much as of their own mettle—as well as of the improvisational skills of the officers who organized the Little Rock Rising.
One of those men crosses the outskirts of the airstrip as the sun rises. His mottled dark green-and-grey uniform is thick with “Dallas Dust,” an oatmeal-colored mixture of pulverized concrete, ash, and mundane winter dirt. Black hair tied in a pigtail hugs his scalp, and a thin white scar on the right side of his face only serves to show off an early bronze tan indicative of ample melanin in his genes. A shortened version of his Razors battle rifle, with folding stock and cut-down barrel, bumps from its tight sling against leather battle webbing. The assault harness is festooned with everything from a wide-bladed utility parang to a gas mask hood, flares for a wide-mouthed gun at his hip, and a “camel” water bladder over his shoulder. Looking at him, a veteran of the Razors would point out the distinctly nonregulation moccasins on his feet and infer that the Razors’ operations officer, Major Valentine, was back from another of his scouts.