by E. E. Knight
Eveready used his own smaller clasp knife to cut open the bag, which Valentine saw with a kind of cold horror really was squirming on its own in the center of the ring of five men. The big Cat dumped the sack’s contents.
“Fuck me!” Burton said, and pulled at the beard he had been growing all summer.
Flopping in the dawn was a pale humanoid torso. Where arms and legs should have been, only tarry stumps remained. A second sack fixed by cording circled around the neck and hid the thing’s face. Burton half laughed, half retched at the sweet corruptive odor that made the Wolves take a step back. Sixteen-year-old Hernandez, the youngest of the new Wolves, crossed himself.
“Never seen one this close, boys?” Eveready asked. The four shook their heads, disgusted and fascinated at the same time.
“There are these big hunting cats in a place on the other side of the world, boys. India, it was called. Big stripy orange things called tigers. You wouldn’t think they could sneak up on anything, unless you saw them moving through tall grass on our televisions, that is. But a momma tiger would teach her baby to kill by swatting something so it was half-dead; then the cub would kill it. Now that ain’t exactly what I’m doing with you cubs, but I want you to get a good look at a Hood up close, minus his robes, in such a way that you’ll live through the seeing of it. Sort of a National Geographic, courtesy of old Eveready.”
The thing rolled on its back and made an inarticulate glubbing sound.
“Bastard can’t talk too good,” Eveready continued, reaching into his forage pouch. “I yanked this out.” The Cat handed over the Reaper’s limp, sixteen-inch-long tongue, and the Wolves passed it around dubiously. It reminded Valentine of a snake, scaly with a beaklike point at the end. “That’s the straw it sticks into you. See the scales? They come up in you like barbs, keep you from pulling away. Not that you have much chance if this honey’s got you in his arms.”
“How… how did you bag it?” Valentine asked.
“I was scouting a little railroad town southeast of Big M’s ruins. Holly Springs. Sources told me this fella came into town about midnight, doing the usual checkup with a company of Quislings out of Corinth. Any time a Reaper comes through, a few folks try to leave town real quick, and this thing goes after them when it was getting on toward dawn. The Quislings were too busy in the henhouses and pigpens to notice much. A hungry Reaper is hard enough to keep up with and maybe they didn’t want to be around when he fed. So these refugees are heading for tall timber on horseback, and the yellow eye here is after them. He got one jifst as the sun came up, fed, and I caught up with him when he got all dopey from the drinking. It was a pretty bright morning for a change, so his eyes weren’t working too well, either. I emptied old Trudy into him from about ten feet,” he said, patting his carbine affectionately. “Shot a leg more or less off where it was showing under the robe, and took the rest off with my cavalry saber before he knew what hit him. I hacked around at his throat and pulled his tongue out from beneath the jaw, Colombian-necktie style. Sacked him up, then caught up with the horse belonging to the poor bastard he caught. Then I about broke my ass getting west.“
Eveready chuckled. “I wouldn’t care to be that Quisling commander in Holly Springs. The Big Boss in Corinth will send some Hoods out to settle things, with me and them both.”
“You covered some miles,” Alistar said. “Where’s the horse, rode to death? We could’ve traded it, at least.”
Eveready shook his head. “There was some border trash camped out by a crick a few miles northeast of here. I gave the horse her head, just took the saddle and bridle off, and she scented the other horses and wandered off. I carried the saddle aways, but it was too much lugging the ghoul and all that leather, too. I didn’t want to be too slow; this guy’s friends might home in on him.”
“Hard on the group by the crick, if the Reapers catch up with that horse,” Valentine suggested.
“They ain’t no friends of yours, son. That’s why I’ve been warning you boys about these borderlands. No law and order. There’s the bad order of the Kurian spaces, and the law of the Free Territory. In fact, you’d be surprised at how orderly some of those Kurian towns are. Everybody with identity cards and permission slips and papers just to go to the outhouse. But between ‘em where we are is up for grabs, and these bastards will rob you and leave you for dead as soon as they’d say ’Good morning.” I figure any Hood pursuit is welcome to ‘em.
“Now let’s get down to business. Gimme your slaying blade, Valentine. Now watch this,” Eveready lectured as if he were in a classroom with glossy black experiment tables instead of a patch of soggy ground forty miles from nowhere. He opened a vertical cut along the thing’s stomach. “See how that black goo comes up when the air hits it? It’s something in these things’ blood that makes an instant suture. If you ever get any on your hands, get it off quick, and whatever you do, don’t get it in your mouth. Put some of this stuff on a dog’s tongue, and it’ll kill the man holding the leash. It’s not so bad though; even when you’re hacking one up, the goo doesn’t fly around that much. It’s too sticky. Make sure you pull your blade out quickly, though; if you leave it in for a few seconds even, this stuff will sometimes glue it right in place. Take my word for it, you don’t want that to happen.”
The Reaper thrashed around in pain, and Valentine stuck his foot on its chest to hold it in place. The smell sickened him. He felt thankful for his empty stomach.
“The sumbitch is moving around too much,” Eveready decided. “Let’s finish him. But I want to look him in the eyes for a second,” he stated, cutting the cords around the thing’s neck with the sharp edge at the tip of Valentine’s parang.
The Reaper’s face was a mess. Two gummed-over bullet holes in the cheek and forehead stood out against the deathly pale skin. Black fangs snarled at them from above the butchered neck. Its eyes were not the pink of a true albino’s but rather black, with slit pupils and yellowish reptilian irises. It hissed, glaring hatefully at the five humans around it. Valentine felt hard pressure against his foot as it tried to wiggle loose despite its injuries. Valentine looked into “its eyes and felt lost in the black depths. Was there such a thing as blacker than black? He felt himself compelled to lift his foot off the thing’s chest.
“Steady there, David. You look like you might keel over,” a voice said from somewhere near the Gulf Coast.
Valentine tried to raise his eyes from the black slits, failed.
Don’t give in to the darkness, a part of his consciousness urged. It’s only the black eyes of the crow, picking at your father’s brains. He raised his eyes up to the lightening sky and planted his foot even more firmly on the mutilated torso.
“That’s better, David,” Eveready said, patting Valentine’s shoulder. “You got to watch those eyes. For a second there, you looked like a bird staring at a snake. You weren’t seeing the Hood, it was the Kurian behind it.”
Eveready leaned over its face, taking a small cylinder from his pocket with his left hand. It was a crusty old battery, of a type invented just before 2022 that had a very prolonged shelf life. A symbol of a black cat leaping through an electric hoop could be seen on the casing.
“Here I am again, hungry Prince,” Eveready taunted at the snapping face. “Old Eveready got another of your drones, you murdering pig. I know it feels good when your little bloodsucker here takes a life. How do you like it when I do this?” He waved the battery label as close to the snarling face as he dared and brought the curved blade down on the thing’s neck with a grunt of effort.
The body quit moving under Valentine’s foot. He glanced down, afraid to meet those baleful eyes a second time. A fresh wave of moldy-crypt odor wafted from the corpse of the Reaper, causing Burton to empty the remains of last night’s dinner from his stomach. Alistar sank to his knees, trying not to join him.
Eveready thrust the parang into the dirt and picked up the head, cautiously draining the black syrup from the neck. Holding it by the scraggly bla
ck hair, he displayed the trophy up for the Wolves to get a good look. “See how the teeth are black? We call that stuff carbonite. It’s not a scientific name or anything; I think it’s out of a movie. Stronger than steel, and Kur builds the Hoods so they use the stuff for their skeletons, teeth, and nails. Stops bullets pretty good. I saw one take a faceful of double-ought from about two feet one time. The eye and nose holes are baffled, not open like in a human skull, so the sumbitch was just blinded, and mebbe couldn’t smell too good either. But it kept coming for us. And while I left this bastard’s fingers behind, they have these pointed black car-bonite fingernails that can claw through a safe door, peeling it back layer by layer.”
The Cat wedged the old battery into the Reaper’s mouth and stuck the head in the crotch of a nearby tree. Its eyes rolled around in their sockets. “It’s dead, don’t let that unsettle you. Just nerve impulses or something.”
Returning to the body, Eveready continued the autopsy. He began to peel back layers of skin with parang and skinning knife, sticking small broken branches through the skin to keep the wounds open. The black tar had stopped flowing with the creature’s death, but an abundance of oily clear liquid seeped out of the cadaver. Alistar was still on his knees and looked about to go to all fours, and Hernandez was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. None of them would eat that day, Valentine suspected.
“Okay, a whole bunch of a human being is taken up by equipment to process different kinds of food into our blood. These monsters don’t need all that; they have as simple a digestive system as can be. But they have this big bladder inside; see that thing that looks kind of like a honeycomb?” He opened up the spongelike organ, bigger than a bovine liver. “Those little sacks fill up with blood like a camel’s hump, and pass through this thing, which is kind of like a big placenta, to its bloodstream. And see those two thick cables going down its sides? Those are nerve trunks; it’s got more than one. Yours goes up the backbone; if that gets snapped, you’re dead. You can break its back and maybe it’ll just walk funny, ”cause it’s got these other nerve trunks. All wired to a couple of balancing organs in the head, gives them ungodly reflexes and agility. Little clusters of nerve cells at pressure points help that. Their spines are much more flexible than yours, like a cat’s, and their knees are hinged so they can bend backward, coiling just about every major muscle in their bodies for a jump.
“Everything’s heavier than ours: bone, skin, muscle. Makes them crappy swimmers. They can move through water, but they really have to thrash, so you can hear them coming with all the splashing. I keep telling the jokers in the Free Territory to dig wide moats around everything they build, something they can’t jump over, but they don’t want to make the effort. If you ask me, if a hundred Kurians got organized, they could go through Southern Command like a bullet through a paper target.”
Valentine raised his hand. Since Eveready was showing this unsuspected schoolmarm side, it seemed the appropriate thing to do.
“Why don’t they?”
“Overrun us, you mean? One of the things we don’t know. We do know that each Kurian boss or Prince or Master or whatever has grown his thirteen Reapers to feed him and run his show. We think it hurts them when one of their puppets gets killed. There’s some kind of special link that allows the vital auras absorbed by the Reapers to feed the Kurian that controls them. Over the years, the stories about Kur got confused, that is if our ancestors ever had them right to begin with. We combined the two creatures, the Reaper and its Master, into one vampire legend. But ‘that’s got nuthin’ to do with nuthin‘’ as my old man used to say. The Masters don’t like to have all their Reapers together in one spot. We think if all of ‘em buy it, so does the Kurian. Those Kurians are selfish pricks, too. They don’t risk their Hoods helping out other Kurians. You see it in the different ways their little principal-ities are organized. Maybe they even fight among themselves, like Mafia gangs—if you know what those were. We can only hope. They’re not too creative. They don’t seem to invent anything. The Lifeweavers got a philosophical answer to that; they say that the Kurians have degenerated over the millennia, becoming like addicts who can’t see beyond the next fix. Nothing matters to them but keeping the vital auras flowing. Even when they invaded, they laid the groundwork well, but once it started, it was like the Oklahoma land rush: they all grabbed a spot and started harvesting… well, us.
“But all that is for the thinkers and strategists and leaders. You boys have got to be the killers, so just remember this one thing: the only damage that puts a Hood permanently out of commission is a central nervous system disconnect. That means severing the head or blowing it to bits. And since they duck faster than most folks can swing, let alone pull a trigger, it ain’t easy. You got to get them when they’re dopey, after they’ve fed or in good daylight. You get them out in the sun without their robes, they get so sick you can slice them up easy as pie. Sometimes they get laid up in a trance, either daytime or nighttime, and that’s a good time to hit ‘em, too. My theory is that a Kurian Lord can’t really control more than one Reaper at the same time, and the others either go on pure instinct, feeding off whatever’s around until they’re gorged and pass out, or they fall into this trance while the Kuriali is controlling a different Hood.”
“Sir,” Hernandez piped up. “You said there would be others on this one’s trail. Are we gonna jump ‘em?”
A small smile broke out across Eveready’s ebony features. “Son, you got more balls than brains. You ain’t even blooded Wolves yet. For the last time, save the sir stuff for the ones that have to hear it to believe in themselves. I’m here to teach you how to keep hid so the Reapers don’t find you. Fighting a Reaper’s a job for a team of Wolves. Yassuh, about ten-to-one odds is what you need. And that’s ten well-armed, experienced Wolves. Even I don’t take on an up-and-running Reaper if I can avoid it. I got all these teeth by being patient,” he said, fingering the rope of polished fangs across his hairy chest. “You need to hit the enemy when he ain’t looking for you, not when he is. A stand-up fight is work for the Bears, and even they die faster than the Lifeweavers can replace ‘em sometimes.
“Nope, it’s been a fun summer, but I want to get you all back across the Saint Francis alive and well. Hopefully a little bit wiser, too. School’s just about out, boys.”
Getting to the Saint Francis meant they first had to cross the Mississippi. Wide, muddy, and sandbar-choked at this time of year, the Father of Waters was no easy obstacle to overcome. Quisling traders and river patrols frequented it in battered boats and bulky barges, pulled by diesel tugs.
The afternoon after the grim session with the Reaper’s body, the party started a leisurely journey westward. The Cat encouraged them to concentrate on keeping lifesign down, but Valentine’s doubts prodded and pulled him out of his sublimation with hard staves. What if he failed to keep himself centered, as the Cat liked to call it, and drew the hunting Reapers to his comrades like sharks to a blood trail? The others seemed so confident, talking about how they would take their first Hood, discussing ambushes and cross fires and carefully planned traps. Valentine had barely survived his first encounter with a Hood, and heard again and again in his mind the terrible screaming of the steady, stolid DelVecchio as the Reaper’s needle-tongue found his beating heart.
The plentiful wild rice and bullheads of the Delta fed the five men on their bayou-bridging journey to the river. The Wolves had grown so experienced in navigating the trackless morass that they hardly thought twice about wading or swimming a bayou in pairs and trios, one group always covering the other as they moved southwest. They reached the great river on a hazy afternoon two days later. Upon sighting it, Valentine forgot his doubts in the breadth and majesty of the current. Or perhaps it was just the change in the air after the miasma of the backwaters.
“Two choices, boys,” Eveready announced from a team-huddle squat. “We build us a raft, or we go find the one we sunk after crossing over back in the spring. Might take a day
or two to find the spot; we’re just a little south of it now. If we build a raft, it means chopping wood, and that can be heard a long way off. Also, we won’t stand a chance if we run into a patrol except to swim for it. If we go to the old boat and raise it, we’ll have something a little more navigable. But I’ve got my doubts it’ll even be there after all these months. The river men and patrols spend all their time along the banks, and chances are one of them already thumped it with a pole or a paddle even if it is still underwater.”
The Wolves decided to vote, with Eveready as tiebreaker. Valentine was the lone vote for building a raft, as he saw little reward and a good deal of risk in blundering along the bank in search of the old aluminum fishing boat that had brought them across the first time. The others remembered a little too well the want-of-a-nail lecture they’d received before departing for the Delta. It concerned coming home with weapons and gear issued, under pain of having to spend the next year on stable and livestock duty.
So they turned north.
Traveling the banks of the Mississippi made even the bayous seem like afternoon picnicking. The flooded and unattended banks turned the great river into a twisting mass of horseshoe loops and tadpole floods. Eveready took what shortcuts he knew and always kept an eye to the river. Although they could spot a patrol boat long before the Quislings had a chance at seeing the Wolves, every appearance of one of the noisy, fiberglass cabin cruisers made them get under cover while it plodded back and forth across the river. The first day there were two such sightings, each one wasting over an hour.
Valentine was jumpy the whole march. The others noticed it and put his mood down to bitterness over the vote on how to get across the river.
“Ain’t nothing here worth the bogeymen keeping an eye on,” Hernandez asserted.
“C’mon, Val,” Alistar added. “With that old gumbo stirrer up on point, we’ve never even been spotted, let alone walked into an ambush.” The gumbo stirrer in question waved from the crest of a small hillock ahead. Eveready had spotted something, and the Wolves obediently waited as the Cat went in for a closer look at whatever it was.