by E. E. Knight
The slight discomfort in her finger helped her subsume her consciousness, entering that mental state that reduced the lifesign Reapers read. She was certain they’d have a Reaper or two watching.
That was the dangerous part. They didn’t need a clear line of sight to “see” you, so they could be lurking in a hollowed-out tree or thick patch of thorn and kudzu.
She followed a game trail. While you could reduce your lifesign by subsuming consciousness, you couldn’t eliminate it entirely, since each of the billions of cells in your body emitted its own fractional amount. Even from a hundred yards or so she might hope to pass as a deer, if she moved in a deerlike fashion, a few steps at a time. But night was fleeing, and she needed to hurry. So she trotted, hoping that she might pass as an escaped dog or coyote. By pausing every now and then to circle a tree, she hoped to add to the illusion. There was no need to lift a leg.
She slowly ascended the hill line opposite the hotel. When she could see the crest, she stopped and made a careful examination with her eyes, allowing them to rest on every tree stump.
The shock of recognition hit her square in the back before her brain fully caught up. There was a Reaper on watch looking east, sure enough. From its point on the hill it could watch the main east-west highway running north of the hotel, as well as the off-road approaches from the east. Just about where she expected it.
As a hunter, you want to know your game.
The Reaper stood still, only its heavy cloak moving slightly in the breeze. At the moment it was looking west. Its head moved slightly at each slow respiration. Perhaps the beast part of it was exhausted and sleeping standing up, or the Kurian animating it was engaged with another Reaper. A few Southern Command personnel were missing, she understood; it was possible that one was being questioned, or worse, by a different Reaper.
She moved crossways on the hill and restarted her ascent.
This was the hard part of quieting your mind. She was getting into the range where the Reaper didn’t even have to see her to know she was there.
When she spotted its head again she let herself relax into lifesign-reducing consciousness. The big problem with this discipline is you never knew how well you were doing it. It wasn’t like a flashlight where you could measure the candlepower or distance of the beam. You just had to go through your concentration exercises and hope. Not even hope—hope was an emotion that might alert it as much as fear or lust.
From close up, it appeared to be only half awake.
Reapers had physical needs like everyone else. It had probably been up all night chasing down Southern Command’s column, and been recalled so a fresher avatar could take over. No Kurian ever had enough Reapers for all its duties: protection, food gathering, surveillance, and interacting with the Quislings. This one was operating on a “reduced power” mode; if it saw unusual traffic on the road it would probably rouse its master, who would in turn bring the Reaper back to full activity.
She suspected she could sneak up behind it easily enough and cut its head off. But its brief pain and death would alert the Kurian that there was someone in the neighborhood with the skill to take out one of his drones.
Instead she reached into her satchel and brought out a heavy fragmentation grenade and a loop of wire. With utmost care she crept to the rocky outcropping beneath the Reaper and slipped the wire around its ankle. A free piece of light cording (she always carried forty or fifty feet of thin cording that was practically weightless but strong enough to bind a prisoner or serve as a bootlace or hold a bundle together for transport) was tied to the pin in the grenade. She fixed the cording to a stout branch.
Ever so slowly she tied off the grenade up tight against its boot.
As soon as it took a step, the pin would pull. It would drag the grenade while the fuse burned—with a little luck it might even notice something bouncing around by its ankle and reach down to see what was the matter and have the grenade go off in its face. A Reaper with a foot blown off would be slowed considerably until it could bolt on (or whatever they did in the Reaper repair shops) an artificial replacement.
With that done, she descended the hill at an angle that put the most rock, trees, and earth between herself and the Reaper, making a beeline for the little strip of town opposite the old resort grounds.
She tried quieting her mind again, but it was difficult with the excitement of action near. The sentry Reaper meant there was at least one Kurian in the neighborhood. Was it at the hotel? If she was very, very lucky she might find out. Killing a Kurian would be the best way to kick off the action of her third summer in Kentucky.
At the sentry station, two guards stood on duty at the gates. A culvert running between the hotel grounds and the road smelled faintly of sewage. She’d heard that the mineral springs at French Lick had an odor that attracted wildlife for the salts or whatever, but this was definitely human waste being dumped out of a latrine into the nearest standing water.
She used it to approach the sentries. They were both keeping well away from the bog. They stood behind one of the gate’s thick posts out of the indifferent wind. Next to them a wooden beam painted optic orange served as a polite warning to stop.
She considered just walking up to them and using her claws. With her arms inside her oversized duster, they wouldn’t know she had her claws on.
The three curved metal blades were something of a joke to most Cats. She’d been made fun of in her earlier days with the Cats for carrying around that extra, easily identifiable metal. They weren’t as effective at killing as a single good knife, and were just about useless on something as tough as a Reaper.
She argued back that they were more than weapons. They were great tools for quickly scaling a tree, any kind of wooden-sided construct like a barn, or an old-fashioned wooden utility pole. They could even be used to go up aluminum or vinyl exteriors if you didn’t mind the noise. And a kill by cat claws could be mistaken for an animal attack or a Reaper under the right circumstances, leading to confusion among the enemy.
What she didn’t say was that she just felt safer with nasty sharp hooks extending from her fists.
But after closer examination, she decided that the best approach was through an overgrown ditch that ran between the ancient railroad line bordering the hotel grounds and the road. There weren’t any dogs on patrol or at the gate. She could wiggle up like a salamander and not be seen until she was too close for them to do much about it.
Crossing the highway would be difficult in the light, but not impossible. There was a dip in the road a few hundred yards north of the sentry gate, and she used it to make the crossing with a quick belly crawl.
Once across she observed from the brush. They didn’t see her, or they would have whipped out binoculars. Unless they were very experienced counterinsurgents, that is, quietly relaying her presence up to the hotel while appearing not to notice.
She dropped into the chill water and mud of the ditch, and began her wet wriggle toward the gate, hugging her sword-stick to her side so as to disturb as little vegetation as possible.
Her cat claws and several knives accompanied her, including a skinner and a tough all-purpose bayonet with a wire cutter, but the one she rarely touched was a well-balanced thrower. She extracted it from its neck sheath (easily reached while absently scratching your head or when ordered to put your hands up and behind your head).
She wanted to get right into action if it looked promising. She hated waiting. She’d wasted too many opportunities, letting a good moment pass in the hope of a perfect one. According to the Cat who had trained her, she should wait until one guard went off to take a leak, or was occupied in some bit of phone business, before disposing of the other. But Val and the Bears were waiting, the guards were bored at their post, and one of them had his back to her.
No sense waiting.
The thrower made hardly a whisper as it cut through the air and disappeared up to the hilt in the sentry’s back.
His companion gave the stric
ken guard a quizzical look—he didn’t scream put probably had an odd expression.
She followed the knife up the bank, sword blade ready and point down behind her, a classic samurai carry, though she hadn’t been given the lineage of her killing technique. Just as the sentry with the thrower in his back sagged, she struck the astonished guard.
Making sure of both of them with her razor-edged sword tip, she pulled the bodies into the wet ditch, minus one overcoat and hat. From the hotel she could pass as one of the sentries.
The sentry-box phone remained silent. She gave it thirty seconds to be sure. The thrill of remaining alive while two enemies bled warm into the cold of the ditch was exhilarating. Valentine sometimes remarked on her eyes after a kill. She’d known too many Quislings to feel sorry for these two. Valentine sometimes grew melancholy after action, as if he’d prefer to be the one dead on the ground while the harvesters of humanity triumphed. Moody bastard.
She suppressed a giggle and tried to regain the pose expected of a Cat of her years and lives.
She sent the two-beeps signal. Three beeps replied—message received. Now she just had to wait for the Bear-filled garbage truck to reach the gate. She cleaned her blades as she waited, hoping some other vehicle wouldn’t arrive first. How quickly could she kill a driver and his passengers, if any?
The garbage tractor puttered south down the highway, two tires of the trailer crunching vegetation on the verge, giving nonexistent faster traffic room to pass.
It pulled into the hotel driveway. The circular white behemoth waited a little way up the hill, perhaps a quarter mile away.
“There’s a lot of trash up there needs burning,” Duvalier said.
“Our specialty,” said the Bear at the wheel. After all these years, Valentine still didn’t much like to drive. Valentine’s hands were running up and down his gear, a familiar sign that he had the nerves. He calmed down in action, always did.
“Coming along?” Valentine asked.
“Mass mayhem’s not my style,” she said. “I’ll hunt around outside, see what I come up with. Something valuable might come out one of the fire exits.”
Valentine nodded. He gave her one last, long look that she felt somewhere between her hip points. “We’ll leave in a hurry. We won’t have time to look for you,” he said.
She touched her fingers to her stolen cap in a wretched excuse for a salute. “Just take care of yourself, since I’ll be too busy for the next couple of days to do it.”
She gave the trailer two hard knocks with the wooden sword sheath as it reeked past. The Bears answered with the classic shave-and-a-haircut tattoo, reversing the usual order of things.
That’s what the Bears lived for, reversing the usual predator-prey structure of the Kurian Order.
Once they were halfway to the hotel, she grabbed one of the sentry’s battle rifles and a bandolier of magazines and followed cover north. She was no sniper, but with enough trigger pulls she could put some quality shit on target, as her shooting instructor used to say.
She’d gone only a hundred yards or so when the crack of grenades exploding on that big veranda opened the action. Firing began, quick bursts that made her think the Bears were already slaughtering their way inside. With blood on the walls they’d be half mad with the fighting already.
She watched the hotel over the rifle sights for a few minutes. A man jumped out a third-story window, but lay on the ground clutching his shin. He was too far away to finish off without the luckiest of shots. She decided not to reveal her position just yet, in case there was someone up in the main parking lot on the hill above with a rifle and a view.
The shooting quieted; what little noise she could hear from the hotel now was probably grenade blasts. The question was, how much killing would they be able to accomplish before having to organize their getaway?
With the Bears raising hell and bringing down thunder, she decided that she would just be in the way of all the bullets.
She heard another faint explosion from off to the east. Had the Reaper sentinel triggered her grenade?
She tried to put herself in the minds of the startled Quislings in the hotel. They were staff types; they wouldn’t make a fight of it. There’d probably be a mad rush to the hotel parking lot, but to make the road you had to drive past the hotel, right under the guns of anyone standing on the porch. No, a clever Quisling would make a different escape.
The hotel stables had several tough four-wheel drives and at least one motorcycle, plus the horses. A good rider on a fresh, strong horse could even outrun the Wolves in the thick timber of the Hoosier forest. The stables were out of sight of the hotel with a wooded hill and a gravel golf-course-type path between the two. They could get themselves organized away from the shooting… .
When she reached the stables, it turned out that she was the only one who’d thought of it as a likely escape route, at least so far. The stables seemed quiet and deserted, except for the sounds of the horses and the methodical movement of a couple of them grazing in the field. A couple of fresh hay bales had been tipped off a cart without being cut open, a sign that whoever was feeding the horses had found something more important to do in a hurry.
She stepped out onto the path and started for the stables. Better hiding spots for ambushing escaping Quislings could be found there, and she would have a few hundred yards’ worth of better view of anyone coming from the hotel.
Once at the stables, she set to work disabling the vehicles. She didn’t have time for permanent wreckage, but she could slow them up by a couple of hours by destroying tires and electrical systems. She started with the biggest truck, a double-rear-axle job with a horse trailer attached. It wasn’t until she’d punctured the tires that it occurred to her that it might be a good escape vehicle for the Bears, since it had Ordnance markings and you could fit both Bear teams in the trailer.
She sighed. Too used to working alone.
Footsteps behind.
A kid in jeans and a white T-shirt with food stains came tearing around the truck, running for his life. She couldn’t check the swing of her sword but she did alter its course, giving him a slight haircut and an abrasion as the flat of the blade skipped across his head. The boy fell at her feet with a cry as if she had killed him. He smelled like fryer grease and onions. He probably worked in the resort kitchen.
She readied her sword again and kicked him hard in the ribs. He yelped, but his appearance didn’t blur or alter. He wasn’t a Kurian escaping in disguise.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
The boy was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Tyler.”
“Get across the highway, Tyler,” she said, pointing. “The shooting won’t last much longer.”
“They’re killing the patients, too!” the boy sobbed.
“All the more reason for you to run. Now get!” She nudged him with the toe of her boot and he took off.
She wasn’t surprised. The Bears, with their blood up, would go through the place like a buzz saw. While they probably wouldn’t shoot wounded in their beds, she could see them blasting anything in Ordnance colors. The hotel served as a convalescent home for Ordnance wounded and they wouldn’t be able to tell who was who when shooting down a hallway. It was a healthy environment for physical rehabilitation. That’s probably why they kept a few horses around—gentle exercise.
Valentine would be upset. He put more stock into the niceties than she did. She thought it was odd that you could do anything you liked to a man on a battlefield, but the instant he was in a hospital he was off-limits, until he got well enough to go back out onto the battlefield to get blown up again.
Speaking of blowing things up, since she had some time she rigged a couple of the trucks with her remaining grenades. It took her just a few minutes to booby-trap two of the bigger trucks.
Thankfully, boot heels on gravel could be heard some ways off. A fat man in a colonel’s uniform came puffing toward the stables. He moved quietly and gracefully for his rotund
ity, on little feet that bounced him along like a dancer. His face was a greasy sheen of sweat and his oversized mouth split his face in two, with wide-set pop eyes giving him a froglike visage. Along with the flab around his belly, he carried a big boxy briefcase full of maps and a smaller, expensive-looking leather satchel with papers and a power cord peeping out.
She hunkered down behind an official-looking open-topped four-wheel drive, but the fat colonel surprised her. He hung his overcoat on a gas pump for the utility vehicles, then headed straight for the motorcycle and set about attaching his cases, the map case in the back and the leather briefcase to the handlebars.
Well, if a speedy getaway is what you’re after, you can’t beat a motorcycle. The colonel looked more like he enjoyed a few brandies and pastries in a comfortable chair than a motorcycle saddle, but you never really know.
She carefully worked her way toward him.
His getaway seemed well planned, but his fingers kept failing him with the various latches and nets on the motorcycle for military gear. She felt almost sorry for him, struggling to tie off an elastic cord that had its usual hook missing. She reversed her throwing dagger and sent it sailing at his head, hilt first.
It struck him on the back of the head with a satisfying rap! but did not lay him out senseless. Nor did his appearance blur, so he wasn’t a Kurian in an unusually imaginative disguise.
Instinctively, he turned around to see who’d thrown the rock or whatever had hit him, and he locked eyes with Duvalier.
“Oh shit,” he said. His face went white. He looked like he was about to faint.
She really should kill him. He was a colonel, and by the look of the fabric and cut of the uniform, someone well cared for by the Kurian Order.
But there was something about his rotund shape and pop eyes that made him a figure more to be laughed at than hated. She was picturing him lying on a lily pad with legs comfortably crossed and fingers clasped. Where did that image come from? Maybe that was how he survived in the snake pit of Quisling rivalries, by making those who might be enemies discount him on appearances. If he’d only make a move to a weapon…