by E. E. Knight
He could now see distant riders galloping along the trail. He stopped counting after estimating fifty. “Let’s get inside our new home and get ready to greet our guests.”
Behind the house a pump stood on a concrete patio. “Oh, pretty please with sugar on it,” Harper said, working the handle. It moved a little too easily; nothing came from the rusty metal spout but noise.
The main room of the house was filled with collapsed roof, but they were able to bring the horses through the back door into a room slightly lower than the larger one. The paneless windows were set so a man at the front could cover the main door, more or less, but the western exposure of rooms off the main one would have to go unguarded. Valentine posted himself at the front window, Harper at the side, and Gonzalez at the rear door. They manhandled an empty refrigerator into the doorway to the main room.
“We ought to be able to hold out for about two minutes now,” Harper said.
“There’s always the chance we’ll make the price too steep for them,” Valentine said, filling a pocket with cartridges.
“I was sick of riding anyway,” Gonzalez said.
“That’s the idea,” Valentine responded. “If we can get them to wait until dark, we just might be able to slip out. Head for steep hills and thick woods. Maybe all they want is the horses. I know we can outrun them on foot, even carrying the mail. Whoever they are, they’re not Wolves.”
Their pursuers approached their refuge with caution. A thin man with a ragged straw hat bearing a single black feather in the brim trotted up toward the house, carbine at his hip. He turned his face suspiciously, first looking at the ruined dwelling with one eye, then the other. Valentine sighted on his dirty undershirt.
“That’s far enough. What’s on your mind?” Valentine shouted.
The thin man’s long face split into a grin. “You boys want parley?”
“We’re willing to let lead fly if you want it that way. Might be better for both if we talked first.”
Straw Hat turned his horse and disappeared downslope. Valentine counted the minutes; every moment toward dusk helped their cause.
He heard horses moving through the woods below the hill. The pursuers were fanning out to surround the house. It sounded like a lot of riders.
Three heavy figures on tall quarterhorses approached the house. Even beneath beard and dirt, Valentine thought he saw a family resemblance. Their scruffy beards were black as coal, save for the center rider, who had two narrow streaks of gray running down his beard. Their hats also bore black feathers tucked in the left side of the hatband like that of the point man.
“Hello, the house,” center rider called. “You wanted a parley, here it is.”
“May I know to whom I’m speaking?” Valentine hollered back.
The man glanced at his younger associates. “Sure, stranger. My name’s Mr. Mind Your Own Damn Business. This is my son Or I’ll Tear Off Your Head and my nephew And I’ll Shit Down Your Throat,” he yelled. “That satisfy the rules of ettycute?”
A few guffaws broke out from below. “Charming,” Harper said. “Why don’t you plant him, Lieutenant?”
Valentine kept his concentration on the rider. “Thank you, Mr. Mind. Looks like you got us four in a box. Is there a way for us to get out of it without a bunch of you winding up dead?“
“Maybe there’s four of you and maybe there’s three. One of your horses is riding light, so maybe you got a woman or a kid in there to think about,” the negotiator called back.
“All we’re thinking about is how many of you we can take with us. The consensus is twenty. If you’re smart enough to know what a claymore mine is, you’ll agree that it’s at least that.”
“Son, we can smoke you out of there easy. You’ll be better off to take my terms: leave us your rifles, and give us the horses and tack. You can keep all your food, all your water, and your handguns, if you got ‘em. And your lives. Even your self-respect, knowing that you met the Black Feather Troop and lived to tell about it.”
“You want the guns, you just try and get ‘em,” Valentine shouted back, trying to keep the calm assurance of Captain LeHavre in his voice. “You’ll get plenty of the business end. How about this: We’ll give you the horses and the tack, and walk out of here after you pull out.”
“No bargaining! I’m giving you five minutes to talk it over. You’re up a dry hill in a building you can’t even cover all the sides of. Bring out your rifles, and we let you walk out and keep heading north,” he demanded with the assurance of a man holding four aces.
Valentine knew he was beat on card strength, but he believed they wouldn’t live to see the sunrise if they walked out of the house without their rifles. The men turned to him, having reached the same conclusions and wanting to go down shooting.
“Gonzo, Harper, get out your blades. There’s something we have to do.”
“Cut the horses’ throats?” Harper asked.
Valentine decided there was still a chance at bluff. “No, we have to whittle.”
Five minutes later, but with over an hour of daylight left, Valentine stepped out of the door with the three rifles in his arms. He inflated his lungs, threw out his chest, and let loose with a high-pitched shriek. The three Black Feathers startled at the cry, which didn’t seem to echo off the hills so much as pass through them.
“Come and get your guns,” Valentine called hoarsely, advancing a cautious pair of steps away from the door. His holster was empty; Harper covered him from behind with the revolver.
“You made the smart move, son,” Mr. Mind said, trying to keep the satisfaction out of his voice. The three rode forward to claim the repeaters.
Valentine carefully placed them on the ground and stepped back.
The older man dismounted, covered by the guns of his younger relations. He knelt to pick up one of the guns. “So, there are only three of you. I thought so. These are mighty fine—”
He made a surprised choking sound and pulled his hands away from the rifle as if it were a rattlesnake shaking its tail.
Carved into the stock of each rifle was a small insigne, a reversed swastika identical to the one Valentine had seen on the canoe and discussed with the researcher at the Miskatonic.
He looked up at Valentine, lips trembling. “Where’d you get these?” he asked.
“Our Masters gave them to us. Their mark is on the saddles, as well. I even have a tattoo. We’re scouting for them, you see. Eight of them moving west as we speak. So take them, but we’ll have them back by morning. In good condition, too: They’ll only be dropped once.”
“Now, son, we had no knowing you had anything to do with the Twisted Cross. Hell, we’re no enemies of yours. You might say we’re on your side. Just this spring we caught a Cat out of the Ozarks. Real little spitfire; the boys ganged her, and we cut her throat, of course. You can ask Lord Melok-iz-Kur, in Rockford. We pay for what we take there with good silver, turned in runners even.”
Valentine smiled. “It seems we’ve just had a misunderstanding here. No one was hurt, no one need know, Mr.—”
“It’s Black Craig Lorraine, sir. At your service. If there’s anything we can do to help you along, anything at all…” The Black Feather was almost groveling.
“Come to think of it…” Valentine mused.
Valentine returned to the house, holding the rifles. “He folded.” Harper handed the pistol back.
“Eh?” said Gonzalez.
“They’re letting us go. In fact, they’re giving us some supplies. Problem is, they’re cannibals, so I had to promise them Gonzalez, since he’s the plumpest of us.”
“Bad joke, Val,” Gonzalez said. “That was a joke, right?”
That night the Wolves rode north with guns, horses, and a new shoe on the spare horse. They were also weighed down by bags of corn, grain, and food from the supplies of the Black Feathers.
“Jesus, Lieutenant,” Harper said, voice tinged with admiration. “When you did that Reaper scream, I about crapped my pants. You could have warne
d us.”
One of the Black Feathers, part of the dispersing ring to the north, waved in a friendly fashion. Gonzalez eyed him warily.
“That was a joke, right, Lieutenant?”
Chapter Nine
Milwaukee, August of the forty-third year of the Kurian Order: The burned-out corpse of a city that once held nearly two million people rots across some eighty square miles on the shores of Lake Michigan. From the steep hills overlooking the great lake in the east to the Menominee and Root Rivers in the west, the city is nothing but hollow shells of buildings, the upper stories now housing bats, hawks, pigeons, and seagulls. The lower levels shelter everything from rats and coyotes to vagrant humans. Green has covered pavement throughout much of the city. Crickets chirp and grasshoppers leap along Locust Avenue, and Greenfield Avenue is precisely that: a green field where cattle are moved along to graze.
The new center of the city is the railway station, where the more favored soldiers and technicians house themselves in a ring around the Grand Avenue Mall. A hobo jungle of casual labor lives around and under the spaghetti-strand warren of overpasses that make up the old Interstate 94/43 juncture. Two Kurian Lords run the city, one from the Grog-guarded 1950 bomb shelter under the Federal Building, and the other from Tory Hill on the grounds of Marquette University. The Miller Brewing Company is still in business, producing but a trickle of the pilsner torrent it once did. Under new management, of course.
Lake Michigan awed Valentine with its quiet majesty. It had nothing of the crashing drama of the ocean shoreline he knew from books. The expanse of water covering 180 degrees of the horizon in almost a north-south line impressed him nonetheless.
He and Randall Harper camped together north of White-fish Bay. They had left Gonzalez in a secluded barn far outside the city limits with the horses after a cautious but uneventful crossing of southern Wisconsin. The only difficulty had been from a pack of guard dogs at a lonely farming settlement who chased them out of a field where they were stealing corn for the horses. The dogs contented themselves with barking rather than biting, and the Wolves had hurried back to their mounts without injury to anything but their dignity.
Now each night they stood behind a four-foot-tall, decorative stone wall in an overgrown park overlooking the lake, waiting for a boat from the White Banner Fleet to show three lights, one flickering, which they would answer with two.
“What exactly is this Flotilla?” Valentine asked his companion.
Harper, comfortably seated with his back to the stone wall, took a puff of one of the noxious cigarettes he smoked. “They’re sympathetic to the Cause, even if they don’t fight the Kurians tooth and nail. They’re smugglers, gunrunners, traders. When they fight the Quislings, it’s more because somebody got double-crossed, or they asked for too big a payoff. The Hoods hate going out into blue water, I’m told, so they leave it to the Quislings and some amphibian Grogs. Naturally the Quislings take bribes whenever they can get away with it. But the Flotilla always fights the Grogs whenever they get the chance. It’s a real blood feud. I guess these Grogs are more partial to human flesh than most.”
“Oh, I think I’ve heard of these. Big Mouths, Snappers, or whatever. They have jaws that open right to left, instead of up and down, right? Kind of fish-frog things?”
“Yep, slimy skin, like an eel. They’re a problem in summer. They go dormant in winter. The real danger’s in the spring, when they lay their eggs, you gotta keep away from the shores of the places they inhabit. They forage miles inland for food. They like the water a little shallower though, so they’re not such a problem here. Up by Green Bay it’s another story, though. And Lake Erie is stiff with them, they tell me.”
Valentine thought of all the times that he had taken a boat out into the lakes of the Boundary Waters, collecting fish for dinner. Strange to think of fish emerging and hunting ashore. “So why does the Fleet carry our mail for us?”
“The Hunters in upstate New York give them guns and ammo, that’s why. Rope, lumber, paint, turpentine, engines, gasoline—all sorts of stuff. We’re lucky. We’re just delivery boys; we don’t have to worry about payoffs. But I got a little grease for the wheels in my bag; it’s sort of expected.”
Valentine shrugged. “Whatever it takes. You’d think they’d be on our side.”
“They are, they are. In fact, I guarantee that you’ll like ‘em. Those sailors got a million stories. Of course, most of it’s lies and brag, but it’s still fun to listen to.”
“I’ll bet,” Valentine said.
The next night the boat arrived. Valentine almost missed it, having wolf-trotted back to Gonzalez’s barn to check on things at the main camp. Both the horses and his scout looked better for a few days’ rest. Gonzalez had explored the area, finding some apple trees and rhubarb growing nearby. The scout had collected a basket of green apples and an armful of rhubarb, and was sharing his findings with the horses. “I saw some tomatoes near there, too. I’ll get ‘em tomorrow, sir,” he reported.
“Just make sure you’re not raiding somebody’s field. We might end up dealing with something worse than dogs. I don’t want any locals to suspect we’re here.”
“No tracks, no sign, and best of all, no Reapers,” Gonzalez reassured him.
“I hope not. Sleep light. I’ll take some apples back, if you have no objections, Mr. Bountiful,” Valentine said, filling his pockets.
“Of course, Lieutenant. Give a few to the sarge with my compliments.”
It was a tired lieutenant who returned to the overlook that evening, having covered fifteen miles on foot in the course of the day. Two hours after sunset, the three lights appeared on the dark lake.
“Thar she blows,” Harper quoted, choosing a curious allusion. Valentine was mentally reciting two on the land and three in the sea, and I on the outskirts of Milwaukee will be.
Harper poured his flammable liquid on two piles of wood, twelve feet apart on the lakeside of the overlook wall, and set them ablaze. One light on the boat began winking on and off, as somebody opened and closed a hooded lantern.
“Are you satisfied it’s them?” Harper asked.
“Yes,” answered Valentine, trying to make out the lines of the little ship.
“Then let’s go down to the beach, sir, and deliver the mail,” Harper said, kicking out his fires.
The ship bobbed in the small swell of the lake. The waters of Lake Michigan did not roar as they struck the shoreline, but instead gently slapped it. The lake almost seemed playful on this idyllic summer evening, and something about the cool water in the warm evening breeze made Valentine forget the dangers of the night. The men waded out, weighed down with their waterproofed message bags, moccasins tied around their necks.
A tiny dinghy met them, its sides a bare sixteen inches out of the water.
“Climb in sideways,” a boy’s voice said from the stern. “You’ll capsize me if you try to vault in.”
The Wolves threw their packs into the dink and rolled into the little boat. It settled in the water appreciably with their added weight.
Valentine looked into the stern, at the figure with the paddle. What he had thought was a young boy was in fact a young woman dressed in shapeless white canvas. She had a round face and merry eyes, looking at her passengers over freckled cheekbones.
“Nice night, eh, boys? Captain Doss sends her compliments to the representatives of the Ozark Free Territory and invites you aboard the yawl white lightning,” she said, flashing an impressive set of teeth.
“The what white lightning?” Valentine asked.
“Yawl,” she repeated. “You know nothing of ships, soldier?”
“Not much,” Valentine admitted.
“It’s a little thing, but seaworthy as a porpoise. A ship not very different from ours made it around the world with only a single man on board. Over a hundred years ago, that was.”
“Good to see you again… Teri, is it?” Harper said, contemplating his soaked deerskin breeches.
“
I thought you looked familiar. Aaron… no, Randall Harper. Met you twice before, I recall. But I didn’t see you this spring.”
“I had the overland route. I don’t want it again,” Harper explained.
“Well, the captain will be glad to see you. So who’s this with you?”
“Lt. David Valentine. He hails from Minnesota.”
She reached over to shake Valentine’s hand. “Pleased to know you, Lieutenant. Teri Silvertongue, first mate of the white lightning. Will it be possible for you gentlemen to be joining us as guests this lovely evening?”
“I can’t think of anything I’d like more, Miss Silver-tongue,” Valentine said, imitating her courteous phraseology. He wondered if Silvertongue was a nickname.
“We go by mr. in the flotilla, man or woman,” Silvertongue corrected. “Just as you do in the Wolves. Will you take an oar, sir?”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Silvertongue. Sergeant Harper here didn’t tell me the ship had a female crew, let alone how you expected to be addressed. Likes to keep a good thing to himself, I guess,” Valentine explained, shooting a glance at Harper. He paddled for the white blob outside the gentle surf.
“Oh, there’s plenty of men in the Flotilla,” Silvertongue explained. “The commodore of our fleet just has a soft spot in her heart for any woman with a sad tale. It’s the only soft spot she has; the woman has steel in her backbone and flint in her heart in all other matters excepting her ‘poor foundlings,” as she calls us. But yes, it’s three women on the lightning. But it beats life on land. The Capos just want us for breeding stock, and their gunbelt lackeys seem to think they have the right to get the job started on any girl who tickles their fancy.“
“Capos?” Valentine asked.
“That’s what we call the Reapers out east, handsome boy.”
The dinghy reached the ship, and Valentine got a good look at the white lightning. Her lines had kind of an off-balanced beauty, with an oversize central mast set well forward and a smaller, secondary mast projecting from far astern.
Captain Doss wore a smart white semi-uniform to greet her guests. The captain had beautiful, dusky skin and the angular features of a storybook pirate queen. Her short black hair matched even Valentine’s own mane in its glossy sheen.