by E. E. Knight
Another flapper appeared on the slanted roof of the Bourne house, crawling down the shingles with leather-draped arms toward Bourne. Valentine chambered a fresh round, sighted, and fired. Bourne heard either creature or bullet, and came out from under the porch roof. Bourne pumped shells into the abomination. It turned over and rolled off the roof.
“That’s two down,” Valentine said, his heart pounding in his ears.
“The main hayloft’s on fire!” someone shouted from the water pump.
Framed in the growing red-orange-yellow light of the burning hay, an ungainly shape waddled toward the upper doors from deep inside the loft. Tottering on short bowlegs, it pulled itself along with long arms like a webbed spider monkey. Two triangular ears jutted like sharp horns from its angular head.
Tank Bourne rested on one knee, feeding a fresh magazine into his rifle. Valentine and the reservists shot, apparently without effect as the bat-thing launched itself into the air. With a series of audible flaps, like clotheslined sheets whipped by the wind, the beast disappeared into the smoke above.
Bourne waved them toward the already burning barn. “We have to get the stock out of there!”
The hay, now well alight, threatened to take not only Weening’s central structure, but much of its livestock, as well. Bourne, Valentine, and a handful of men dashed inside, throwing the lower doors all the way open. Rising heat whipped the wind inside. The men pulled, pushed, and cajoled the stupefied cattle, which stood frozen in their stalls, away from the flames. Weening’s few horses needed little encouragement, but added to the Noah’s Ark confusion in the great barn’s lower level as they danced and collided in their rush for the door. Once they coaxed a few cows into moving, the rest took to the idea with a will and followed the horses, bellowing their panic into the night air.
The pair who dared climb the ladder, covered by every available gun, fought the fire on the roof of the silo. Valentine prayed there wouldn’t be an explosion. Bullets felled two more bat-things as they tried to pluck the men from the heights. They extinguished the most immediate threat to the village. Layers of corrugated iron and shingles bought enough time for the coughing men to beat the fire into submission with water-soaked blankets.
As the gunfire died down, women and children emerged to help combat the blaze with bucket chains and another canvas hose. The main barn could not be saved, but the smaller buildings, coops, and pens that stood near it in the center of town stayed wet thanks to brave souls who dared the heat of the burning bam to douse them with buckets of water.
Bourne, rifle held ready at his chest, still watched the skies. “Those Harpies haven’t been in these parts in years,” he told Valentine. “When I was with the Bears, we caught a couple hundred of them in daylight. Burned them out of an old bank they were sleeping in. We shot them out of the sky in daylight easy. They’re big, slow targets, compared to a duck on the wing.”
“Slow?” Valentine asked.
“Yes, they’re better gliders than they are fliers. Especially if they are loaded with grenades. They’re pretty smart, at least enough to know when to attack and when to try to get away.”
“Would they fly in the day?”
“I doubt it, too much chance of a patrol seeing them.”
Valentine felt his pulse quicken. “They hit us within an hour of sunset. How far could they fly in that hour, Mr. Bourne?”
Tank looked at him, bushy eyebrow raised in interest. “I see where you’re heading, young man. Hmmm, they’d be flying against the wind out of the east. I don’t think they’d be more than fifteen miles away. Ten’s more likely.”
Valentine belatedly remembered Cho. “I’ve got a wounded man on the west gate. Can you help me get her in? After that, I want to find out which way they went when they flew off.”
“There’s a stretcher in the tack shed where you keep your gear. I’ll help you bring her in, but we don’t have a doctor anywhere hereabouts.”
They found the young Helm boy propped up against a tree, eyes gaping and empty. His neck had a ragged hole in it just below the Adam’s apple. The wound looked as if someone had probed his chest cavity with an oversize drill.
Cho was missing.
Whatever took place at the west gap had happened so fast that the boy couldn’t even get off a shot with his carbine, which lay fully loaded and broken in half on either side of his body.
“There’s a Hood nearby,” Bourne observed coldly. “Poor kid, he was dead before he knew what was happening.”
“Could Cho still be alive?”
“Maybe. It fed off Dorian here. Broke his neck then went for the blood. Chewed a hole in his neck and stuck its tongue right into his heart. Ever seen a Reaper tongue? Pointed at the end, like a big rubbery syringe.”
Guilt hammered at Valentine with a string of precisely aimed blows. You left Cho unprotected in the open, watched by a kid who shouldn’t even have been responsible for covering the west gate from a loophole. You pulled him out of his house and left him in his own backyard to get his heart pierced. Two people are dead because you couldn’t stand hurting an injured buddy by moving her. Nice work, Valentine. The Kurians need a few more like you giving orders.
All the more reason to make them wish they had tried someone else’s friends, a stronger part of him countered.
At the watchtower over the main gate, three farmers gulped at the roasted hickory nut drink called coffee for lack of a more accurate term. Valentine asked them for their best guess about which direction the Harpies were last seen flying and got three slightly different answers. The consensus seemed to be a little north of east.
Most of the town still worked to keep the blaze from spreading. The exception was the Helm family; the father retrieved his son’s body while Mrs. Helm sat on the steps of her porch with her arms around her other two children, dully watching the flames consume the great barn.
Valentine climbed down from the watchtower. Bourne and the other eight reservists waited by the Militia stable tack shed. Recently turned earth next to the little wooden shack exposed two stout cases. Bourne gingerly examined the contents of one of the open cases.
“How is it, Tank?” Valentine asked.
“Still usable. We turned it this summer when we blasted the new drainage ditch from town. Quickest way I know to get rid of tree stumps.”
“If I promise not to ask where you got it, will you spare us some of that bang?” Valentine knew the dynamite had probably been lifted from a Southern Command supply cave, perhaps with the aid of a small bribe to the resident quartermaster.
“If it means paying the Harpies back in their own coin, I’ll tie up a couple of five-stick bundles and have them fused before you can say nitroglycerin. Part that worries me though, kid, is you wanting to take off right now. Wandering around in the dark with a Hood around, looking for something you aren’t sure where it is—well, it’s like playing blindman’s buff in a room full of buzz saws.”
Valentine squatted down and looked at the dynamite. “I want to hit them while they think we’re still busy with this fire.”
“Yeah, I buy that. One thing you got going for you, anywhere these things are holed up, it’s sure to smell like a well full of dead skunks. They shit as much as pigeons, and you up everything proportional. I know they eat like crazy and their handlers aren’t too particular about what they feed them.”
Valentine’s entire team volunteered for the duty, but in the end he took two. He asked two others to borrow horses and ride for the nearest Command post. The rest would guard against further attack in case the Harpies came back to finish the job. He just prayed the Reaper didn’t decide to come back.
Valentine took Gil DelVecchio and Steve Oran with him. Steve Oran, a brassy young man who enjoyed hunting, had ventured many times into the borderlands east of Weening in search of game. Oran had the best knowledge of the land and excellent eyes. He’d once explored as far as the Saint Francis River, which marked the belt of uninhabited land surrounding the Ozark F
ree Territory. Gil was a powerfully built farm boy from the Missouri Valley in the Dakotas. He exuded strength and could be relied on to keep his head in a fix. DelVecchio had been one of the two men to climb the silo: his sweaty skin was still stained with soot.
The three forced down a quick meal as they loaded up two days’ supplies in rucksacks. With weapons, ammunition, dy-namite, and almost no camp gear, they could move quickly even in rough terrain. Valentine brought his pistol, with six bullets left in the magazine, and the best compass and map Bourne could provide.
They hiked out the main gate a few minutes after midnight, turning down an offer by the other Helm boy to go along as guide. Valentine told him he would help his family more by fighting the fire that threatened their house. He mentally added that while the killing machine that took his brother was probably elsewhere by now, perhaps striking again in the confusion of another Harpy attack, there were too many other risks in the eastern dark for Valentine to chance losing both of a mother’s sons the same night.
The Reaper was much on Valentine’s mind as the three men moved east. Oran picked the trail; Valentine followed several paces behind, making sure he stayed on course; and DelVecchio walked just behind, rifle ready for instant use. The Hood obviously worked with the Harpies, but would it decide Cho was a valuable prize to be taken for questioning? Her nondescript uniform differed little from any other impoverished resident’s, and she carried no weapon. She was grabbed as a weak target that could not put up much of a fight, to be consumed at a later time.
Valentine prayed Cho had lost consciousness from pain and shock. He could not bear the thought of his closest friend being carried east to a dreadful end, screaming out her pain the whole way.
By three in the morning the men reached the wide Saint Francis River. A few ruined buildings that had been reclaimed by the wilderness more or less stood on its hilly banks. Valentine looked into the skull-like emptiness of a brick house, the interior nothing but humps of collapsed roof and saplings, and thought of the world-that-was. Fifty years ago, little cabin cruisers and fishing boats must have floated up and down the river, its banks under control and sandbars dredged. But with man occupied elsewhere, Nature had reclaimed her own. At a rest halt, he began to despair of their hunt. The Harpies could be anywhere.
“Val, there’s a light on the river,” Oran reported.
The three climbed a little promontory and looked north at the distant speck of light. It was near the western bank of the hundred-yard-wide river, but whether it came from boat or shore could not be seen at this distance. Who would be fool enough to burn a light right at the border? A guide for the returning fliers? Valentine wondered, suddenly hopeful.
They decided to check it out. Valentine and Oran readied their rifles and picked their way north, keeping under cover. When they got close enough to see that the light in fact came from a boat, they rested for a few minutes before creeping forward again.
“It’s a small barge and a towboat,” said Oran, who had the best night vision of the three, and therefore used the binoculars. They lay in a little hollow, peeking at the river from behind a fallen tree. “Looks like five men visible on the towboat. One’s got a gun. No one is on the barge. It’s riding light, must be practically empty. The light is on the barge, electric, not a lantern.”
The towboat was attached to a ruined concrete piling projecting out of the lake, perhaps the last remnant of a dock.
Oran leveled the binoculars at the barge. “They got it anchored at the front and back. If anyone’s in it, they’re staying hid.”
A gust of wind off the river made the men wrinkle their noses. They exchanged glances.
“I think we’ve found the nest,” said Valentine.
They hashed out a plan. Valentine would take a bundle of dynamite and swim to the ship from the north end of the barge. When he set it off, the other two men would start sniping at the tugboat, with hope that it would be lit by the burning barge, and use the other bundle of dynamite on it from the shore. Gil said he was sure he could throw the bundle the thirty feet from the shore to the boat.
“Here, Val,” DelVecchio said, pulling a hand ax from his belt. “You might need this. Who knows what might be in that hull?”
The weapon was light and handy, more of a fighting tomahawk than a tool. “Thanks. We’ll meet back here,” Valentine ordered. “If you’re being chased, just go west like hell, don’t wait for me.”
“Hope you don’t puke easy, if you’re going close up to that thing,” Oran commented, tension written in boldfaced capital letters on his face.
“Let’s not waste any time. I want to get this over before dawn. Maybe that Hood sleeps in the barge.”
Valentine stole past the lounging figures on the tug. If five men were up and around at this hour, perhaps ten more might be crammed below. Or were they out, somehow helping the Harpies? Once he had the bulk of the barge between him and the towboat, he crawled through vegetation to the water. The dynamite, matches, and his pistol rested on his back, in a pack that might keep the water out for a moment or two, if he was lucky.
Valentine kicked off his shoes and crawled into the cold water. It reminded him of his bath, and how Cho had dried him off afterwards. He took the comforting wood handle of the tomahawk in his hand and half floated through the water toward the barge, moving like an alligator with just eyes and nostrils out of the water, the pack making a sea-monster hump on his back. He felt as alive and alert as if he had just finished a light breakfast after a long night’s sleep, rather than having been awake for eighteen hours.
It was a good thing he hadn’t eaten recently. When he slithered close enough to really smell the barge, a horrible musky odor mixed with a sharper turpentine-like smell assaulted his nostrils. The hazy moonlight revealed details of the ancient barge, a mass of rust and paint and makeshift welds with M-33 painted on its side in three-foot-high letters. He shifted the tomahawk to his mouth, holding it between his teeth with straining jaws, and breaststroked into the river. He made for the stern anchor line. The gentle current assisted him with its chilly flow. He reached the cable, grateful for its hand-filling thickness. He climbed it, still gripping the ax in his teeth like a dog with an oversize bone.
The deck of the barge was as beat-up as its sides. It had a single hatch open to the sky. The battery-powered lamp, a conglomeration of what looked like a car battery and a truck headlight, pointed up into the night but seemed to bathe the whole top of the barge with an intimidating, revealing light. Valentine wished he had told Oran and DelVecchio to start firing when they saw him reach the barge; he could use something to draw the men’s attention to shore. Still dangling, he gently placed the hatchet on the deck of the barge. Now or never.
He hoisted himself up on deck and crawled for the hatch. Expecting a shout at any second, he peered into the reeking hold. He could make out little in the dark, but there seemed to be floor six feet or so down.
He rolled over the edge and landed barefoot in sticky filth, ax ready. The hold stank like a slaughterhouse, and he had to fight down his gorge as he stood up in a cramped little area.
A gutter ran the length of the deck, filled with noisome excrement. The hollow interior was empty.
No. As his eyes adjusted, Valentine realized that a panting shape leaned against one wall. It was a Harpy, wrapped up in its own wings as though in a leathery cocoon. A trickle of blood pooled beneath its rump. Wounded, maybe dying. The debris on the floor included a melange of bones. A cluster of human skulls decorated a metal pillar, part of the barge’s rusting structure holding up the deck. The heads looked like a yellowish bunch of coconuts. There was a door forward out of the hold. A body lay at the bottom of stairs descending from the door: pale, naked, and headless. But it was nevertheless familiar.
Valentine had found Cho.
An awful kind of warmth filled his stomach. He no longer minded the reek. He padded toward the sleeping Harpy with slippery steps. He could make out slit nostrils and a toothy, p
ointed jaw decorated with bristling catlike whiskers protruding from the tent of folded wings. Wet drool dripped out with its rapid, shallow breathing. He raised the ax and buried it in the face with a bone-crushing blow. The thing never knew what happened, falling nervelessly sideways. Valentine leaped on top of it, bringing the blood-and-brain-soaked tomahawk down again and again with a series of wet smacks. Flecks of blood splattered his snarling features.
A familiar flapping sound came from the hatch, and the light reflected from the deck lamp was obscured by a winged shadow. Valentine crossed the hold to the forward stairs to the door, keeping clear of the hatch. He could sit there, light the dynamite, and blow a few Harpies to kingdom come.
Shots echoed from outside. DelVecchio and Oran must have panicked at the returning Harpies and tried to prevent them from reentering the barge. Valentine somehow ignored Cho’s body, took his pistol, and tossed the backpack onto the stairs. A Harpy flopped into the hold, one wing injured.
“Welcome home, fucker,” Valentine cursed, putting a bullet into its stomach. The spent cartridge case pinged off the metal interior.
The Harpy screamed out a horrible, burbling kind of call. Language or pain, it brought answering shrieks from outside. Valentine knew he was drawing all kinds of ugly from the skies as well as the tugboat, but he wanted Cho’s body to have a lot of company feeding the crayfish and gars. He heard, for the first time in his life, the chatter of a machine gun fired in anger. The tugboat crew must have a support weapon mounted on deck. He prayed that DelVecchio and Oran were smart enough to pull out now and head west.
He pounded on the roof of the hold, dislodging a shower of grit. “Dinner, dinner, come and get it!” he shouted.