by E. E. Knight
“Let’s pump it, Val. We still got a chance. The fucker’s a ways off, still. Hernandez,” he said, knocking the sleeper with his foot. “Nap time’s over, you got to do some rowing.”
Hernandez yawned, pushing one arm into the sky and rubbing his eyes with the other. “Jeez, that felt great. How many hours did I sleep?”
“About two minutes. Get up here and row,” Valentine ordered.
“What?”
Burton tossed the oar toward him. “Reaper is swimming for us. Don’t drop your oar this time.”
Propelled by terror, the three men pushed themselves to a stroke every two seconds. Valentine used his hard ears to locate the splashing, which began to fade first to the left, and then astern.
“We’re leaving him behind. I think,” Valentine said through gritted teeth.
A few minutes would tell the tale. Valentine counted strokes. At 214, he realized the ominous splashing was getting louder.
“Hell, a Hood,” Burton swore, puffing. “How fast is it going?”
“Faster than us,” Hernandez said.
Valentine could not resist looking over his left shoulder every few seconds. The moon was up, but high, thin clouds muted its three-quarter face. Their strokes began to slow as exhaustion set in. Valentine saw a pale figure, arms whirling like paddle wheels, splashing along behind them.
“I can see it now,” Burton said, resigned.
A horrible image of the Reaper closing remorselessly on them flickered through Valentine’s mind. It would swim underwater the last few feet, push up and turn over the boat, then tear each of them to bits in the water. He looked back at the steadily gaining swimmer, moving through the water at a speed no Olympian could match, pale back visible in the moonlight.
It had removed its robes to go faster through the water.
“Take a rest,” Valentine ordered, picking up Trudy. The magazine held thirty rounds. Another magazine rested in a leather pouch on the offside of the stock.
“What do you mean, take a rest? We gonna shoot ourselves?” Hernandez asked.
“I’m going to take a crack at him with Trudy,” Valentine explained. “It took off its robes to go faster through the water.”
“Jesus help you shoot straight,” Hernandez babbled.
Valentine carefully tucked himself against the stern. He sat down, bracing his back against Burton’s seat. He brought the rifle to his cheek and set the sights for a hundred yards. The two other Wolves panted as Valentine tried to quiet his own respiration and steady his trembling muscles. Exhaustion or fear? he wondered.
Breathing out, he fired three times, pausing for a second between each shot. The thirty-caliber carbine shell had a fair kick, but braced as he was, knee against the side of the canoe and back braced by the bench mounted behind him, the recoil was negligible.
Machinelike, the Reaper swam on. At this distance, Valentine couldn’t make out splashes to see if he was hitting. He let the distance close another twenty yards, then fired three more times.
The Reaper dived.
Valentine scanned the surface of the water. How far could it go without air?
The wooden stock felt comforting against his cheek. He lowered the barrel slightly.
The thing breached twenty yards closer, and Valentine shot five times, missing in his panic. It disappeared underwater again.
Calm, calm, his mind told his body, but the body refused to cooperate. He quivered, unable to control the nervous tremors.
Jesus, it’s close. The fierce, pale face surfaced twenty yards away, gulping air. Valentine shot, splashes erupting within inches of the head. One shot tore a black gash in its cheek. The head disappeared.
“Now, row, row for your lives!” Valentine shouted. He braced himself for the expected upheaval, as the thing tried to make it under the boat.
The canoe gained speed. Barely an arm’s length away, the Reaper breached, coming halfway out of the water like a porpoise. Its mouth was open. Black teeth gleamed in its hellish fury.
Trudy spat as fast as Valentine could pull the trigger. Black holes appeared in the Reaper’s chest as the spent cartridges bounced off the wooden sides of the canoe and into the water. The thing fell backward, thrashing more feebly. It rolled over and floated, facedown.
Valentine looked wonderingly at the smoking weapon and said a silent prayer for Eveready’s safety. Trudy had saved their lives.
Valentine angled the canoe toward the western shore with the earliest light. There was always the chance that a river patrol would stop them. From here on, getting back into the Ozark Free Territory was just a matter of bearing northwest for a couple of days.
Burton looked back into the river. “I don’t believe it. He’s still coming.”
The Reaper swam on, using a sidestroke motion. So bullets were useless, after all. Valentine suppressed an urge to press the barrel of the rifle under his chin and blow his own brains out in defiance.
“Let’s get ashore,” he said, defeated.
The others carried their packs in one hand, rifles in the other. Valentine pushed the canoe off into the current and climbed up a short ledge to the riverbank proper. Burton was already heading toward a fallen tree.
The Wolves knelt down behind the log, too tired to run. Two single-shot breechloaders and a full magazine in Trudy, Valentine thought. Plus our parangs. Enough?
The Reaper paddled toward shore, leaving a wake that aimed at their tree like an arrow.
The haze dissipated into a cloudless morning. The sun shone yellow and bright, inching above the horizon.
Valentine looked at the sky in wonder. Only rarely, outside of winter, was it this clear overhead.
“We’re saved. Saved by the sun,” Valentine breathed.
The Reaper reached shallower water. It, too, raised its head to the sun, but in pain rather than praise. Thin black hair lay plastered over its chest and shoulders. Bullet holes formed a reverse question mark shape on its chest, and one arm hung askew.
Valentine stood up, copying Eveready’s taunt. The Reaper cocked its head, shutting its eyes to squeeze out the daylight.
“Are you coming for us?” Valentine shouted.
The Reaper straightened. Its ears were working better than its eyes. It staggered, hammered by naked sunlight.
Not today, it seems, but some night, in a lonely place, you’ll be taken, it hissed.
“But not by you,” Valentine said, raising his rifle.
The thing dived backwards, disappearing beneath the water.
In some ways, Valentine thought, it’s almost better than killing it. It ran. It was afraid.
They made New Arkansas Post in four days. The little wooden fort on a bare hill overlooking the Black River was built like something out of an old-time western, right down to the sharpened logs serving as crenellated walls. More supply depot and stable than actual fort, it still contained the welcome sight of a cantina.
Eveready was waiting for them on the cantina’s porch in a rocking chair, happily munching an apple, finishing everything but the stem. Two new fangs hung from his necklace. He chided Valentine about not finding the time to properly oil Trudy’s stock after exposing her delicate wood to water.
Lewand Alistar was posted as missing a week later. His family received notification the following spring, during the recruiting swing through the Council Bluffs area of Iowa.
Chapter Six
Pine Bluff, Arkansas, fall of the forty-first year of the Kurian Order: At the beginnings of the fertile, flat corner of southeastern Arkansas, the crossroads town of Pine Bluff thrives. Strategically located on the chord of an inhabited arc covering the borderlands in that quarter, a permanent garrison regiment of Guards frequently offers its hospitality to Wolf patrols into Louisiana and Mississippi.
Independent farmers from as far away as Drew County come to barter with the Southern Command Commissioners. The town itself boasts eight churches, a high school, blacksmiths and boatwrights, teamsters and tailors. The Guards stable the
ir horses at the old Livestock Showgrounds, and no less than a full regiment known as the Bluffs protects the Old Arsenal, the largest and arguably the best munitions plant in the Free Territory. The Old Arsenal produces everything from bullets to bombs, protected by the heaviest concentration of pre-Overthrow machine guns in Southern Command. In town, the Molever Industrial Wood Products plant has switched from making pallets to sturdy wagons and river barges, and numerous craftsmen exhibit their wares each weekend at the Sixth Avenue Street Market. On evenings each weekend, the Saenger Theater Players sing, dance, and act out famous scenes from old movies and plays. The aged theater’s cool limestone and Florentine decor make an opulent break from the meanness of everyday life. Shakespeare makes an occasional appearance on the billboard, but more often a tear-streaked heroine shakes her fist at the sky against a fiery red backdrop, vowing never to be hungry again, or a pair of lovers affirm deathless devotion as they cling to wreckage behind billowing sheets meant to represent an icy sea.
There is a sense of stability, order, and permanence to the place that the settlements on the other borders lack. The tracts of relatively empty Louisiana and Mississippi wetlands protect it from quick forays, and the Guards are experienced at fighting river-borne incursions. Their clothes are a little better, the food is a little more varied, and the buckchits are more welcome here than in the remoter regions of the Free Territory. There is a regular newspaper and more regular mail, and even a social stratification of sorts has taken hold, for better or worse. The complacency here is a true achievement, one paid for in blood on the other borders.
David Valentine received orders to join Zulu Company at Pine Bluff shortly after making his report to the officers at New Arkansas Post. With the gift of an aged horse from the post commander, a haversack of food from the supply sergeant, and a parting bag of apples from Eveready, he rode west up the scenic, if broken-down, western highway. Once known as US Highway 65, now called the Arkansas River Trail, it is one of the better all-weather pikes of the Free Territory. Making easy stages out of respect for his slow-stepping mount, Valentine reached the shores of Lake Pine Bluff.
Valentine smelled the sentries before he saw them. The tobacco and wood-smoke odor meant there were men in the little earthen bunker even if nothing could be seen in the gloom beneath the head logs. A pair of horses stood side to side swishing flies in the morning breeze inside a little split-rail corral overlooking the broken road. Valentine sniffed again and suspected halfhearted enforcement of latrine discipline in what, to the Guards anyway, must seem wilderness.
Head bobbing and ears forward, his horse quickened its walk. The roan gelding was old and wise and knew the smell of horses on a good diet.
A slight figure in a charcoal-gray uniform, comfortably barefoot with riding boots off, appeared from the dugout and waved. Valentine turned his horse with a gentle nudge of his moccasined heel.
“Good morning, stranger,” said the youth, teal blue kepi and neckerchief proclaiming his membership in the Bluff Regiment. “What’s your business up in town?”
Valentine brought up his forearm, palm outward, in the old Indian greeting. Not quite a salute, but friendly enough.
“Good morning,” responded Valentine, but as most of his mornings began at the first pink of dawn, it seemed a little late for the salutation. “I’m three days out of New Arkansas Post with orders to report to the Commanding Wolf. Whereabouts can I find Captain LeHavre?”
“I need to see your orders,” the sentry said, holding out his hand.
“They’re verbal. The Wolves don’t use much paper, Bluff.”
“Then I can’t let you through. We can send a message to get one of your Wolves in for escort, but I don’t have authority to let you through.”
More like too much authority and too little brain, Valentine thought. A good empiricist, he decided to test the theory. “Is that so? What’s up the road that a man with a single-shot rifle on an old horse might take out, anyway?”
The soldier patted his rifle stock.
“Maybe you’re a spy, come to look at the arsenal. Count the machine-gun posts, map out the tanglefoot paths. Maybe you’re going to set fire to a barge full of black powder and blow up everything on the dock—”
“Enough of that, Johnson,” a stern female voice called from the bunker. “If he is a spy, he can turn around now. You just told him all he needs to know.” A middle-aged, uniformed woman came out of the bunker and approached the road in the measured, confident stride of NCOs the world over. “We heard a Wolf was coming in from downriver. I figured you’d be on foot by now; any horse old Gregory would part with has got to be on its last trip. Is there news?”
“Not that I’m aware of. You’re wrong about the horse, he’s a nice ride, long as you don’t ask more than he wants to give. Good thing, too, since I’m bareback,” Valentine said.
“You’ll find LeHavre up the road a few miles, just into town proper. The Wolves always camp at Old Harbor Woods, right at the north bend in the river. There’s a brick entrance off the road, says it was a golf course. Still is, actually, on the sheep meadow. Don’t have time for the game myself. You’ll see your little tepees around the old clubhouse. Tell Captain LeHavre that Brit Manning says hi. We were at Webber’s Falls together.”
“You were a Wolf?” asked Valentine, not even knowing in what state to look for Webber’s Falls on a map.
“No, but owing to your caste, we were ready for them when they tried to push into Fort Smith. Exactly ten years ago May. We bushwhacked them from the north while they were in the middle of ferrying across. So many Grogs ended up in the river, they say the Arkansas ran red. It didn’t really, but it was still pretty hot there for a while. Two companies got caught on the wrong side of the river, and his Wolves saved our auras. You might say I thanked him personally after-wards,” she reminisced, a sly smile crossing her weathered features.
“I’m sure he’ll remember.”
“You want some coffee, son? Just chicory, but it’s hot. I’d offer you some lemonade, but my four boys here drank it all first two days we were here, and the rinds haven’t soaked long enough to make another batch.”
“No, thank you, Sergeant Manning. At my horse’s pace, I’ll be lucky to make the town by dinner.” Valentine offered a true salute, crisply returned. “Thank you for the directions.”
Captain LeHavre’s steady green eyes evaluated Valentine from his pulled-back hair to his stained knee-high moccasins, fingers drumming against his thigh. The company commander wore the look of a busy man who accepted only efficiency.
The captain and Valentine both stood in the sole leak-free room in the old Harbor Clubhouse. Its dark paneling hinted at a previous existence as either an office or a small library. Two comfortable armchairs and a table, piled above and below with a honeycomb of plastic milk crates, almost filled the warm little room. Black-and-white photographs, most bearing the marks of poor film stock, hung in rough frames.
LeHavre flaunted the swarthy good looks and heavy mustache of a romance novel pirate or ruthless western outlaw. His athletic build, spoiled slightly by the hint of a paunch, set off his forest green buckskins, so dark they looked almost black in the dim light of the windowless office.
Offering Valentine a warm handshake in the worse-for-weather main entrance to the clubhouse, LeHavre invited his new Wolf to the “records room.” Both men sank into the armchairs with the appreciation of the rarity of such comfort.
“You might call this our cave,” LeHavre explained with a casual wave toward the laden table. “These papers are the closest thing we have to a headquarters. The milk crates just make moving easier. The rest I leave to the clerk. Coffee, tea, beer?”
“A beer would be very welcome, sir,” Valentine responded gratefully. “It’s been a long summer.”
LeHavre rose from the chair without using his arms, almost a levitating trick. “I’ll bring two cool ones from the basement,” he said.
Valentine looked around at the pic
tures, wondering about a man who would treat a wet-behind-the-ears recruit like an honored guest. In less than a minute, a breathless brown-skinned girl, seven or eight years of rubber-band energy and frizzy hair, bounced into the room with a clasp-stoppered bottle. LeHavre followed the little dynamo. “Meet David, Jill. David hails all the way from the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes. Which state is that, tadpole?”
“Minnesota,” she said, showing a proud smile as she handed over the bottled beer. “Hi, David. Did you swim in those lakes?”
“Er, some of them. Why, do you like swimming?”
“Does she like swimming!” LeHavre interjected. “I check her feet whenever I can to make sure they aren’t growing flippers. Don’t I, tadpole.”
“Uncle Adam!” she squealed.
“David came on a horse. Can you take him to the corral? He looks like he needs a brushing.”
“Can do!” Jill said. “Nice to have made your act-tense, David.”
“Acquaintance,” LeHavre corrected.
“Likewise, I’m sure,” Valentine responded, shaking her hand.
“Acquaintance,” the girl repeated, a furrow crossing her brow. She solemnly returned the handshake and stepped backwards out the door.
“That’s Jill Poole. Her father was a lieutenant of mine. He died in a fight about three years ago. I look in on her mom whenever we’re in the area. She runs a nice little boarding-house right by the river. Fine woman; she keeps a firm hand on the boatmen who stay. It’s not quite a marriage, but I think of Jill as my daughter. She’s fearless around the men. Most of them remember Poole, and they indulge her. She loves making beadwork. Most of the Wolves in Zulu Company have a bracelet or something of hers.”
LeHavre opened his bottle. “To the people we’re fighting for,” he toasted.
“Prosit,” Valentine responded, imitating a memory of his father. The cool froth flushed the dry road away.
“My apologies, Valentine. I’m sure you want to know about the outfit you’ve been ordered to join. Zulu Company is one of ten companies in the Arkansas Regiment, which makes up the smaller half of the Wolf Brigade. There’s only three thousand or so Wolves in all of Southern Command, counting Aspirants and reserves, and we’re the most numerous of the Hunters. We’re in reserve now. But don’t expect to spend a lot of time dancing at regimental balls. Maybe two thirds of the regiment is together when we’re wintering in the Ouachitas. We don’t often fight shoulder-to-shoulder; the last time was when we stopped a Grog incursion out of St. Louis. That’s when Poole bought it.