by E. E. Knight
The sniper panicked at the sight of Gonzalez continuing straight for his hiding spot. He rose, a monstrous swamp-troll apparition trailing green threads like a living weeping willow. The sniper raised his rifle again with Gonzalez a scarce ten yards away.
The scout threw himself down at the shot. Valentine, a few yards behind Gonzalez, was breathing too hard to trust himself to shoot accurately. He shifted his grip to the barrel of the rifle and wound up as he dashed forward.
The long camouflage strips hanging from the Quisling’s sleeves caught in his rifle’s action. As he struggled with it, Valentine swung his gun baseball-bat style, using the momentum of his charge to add further force to the impact. He struck the sniper full in the stomach, emptying the man’s lungs with the harsh cough of a cramping diaphragm. Valentine dropped his gun and drew his parang from its sheath on his belt. As the gasping Quisling writhed at his feet, Valentine stepped on the man’s back and brought the blade down on the vulnerable back of his neck once, twice, three times. The blows felt good, sickeningly good: a release of fear and anger. The body, its head severed, twitched as the man’s nervous system still reacted to the blow to the midriff.
Valentine moved to Gonzalez, who now sat up, shaking and swearing in Spanish.
“Vamos!” Gonzalez said through clenched teeth. “Get to the horses. I’ll catch up.”
“I need a breather, bud,” Valentine said, and meant it. He listened to the distant horses. They were far off, maybe far enough.
“No, sir… I’ll catch up.”
“Let’s get a tourniquet around your arm. I don’t want you leaving a blood trail. I’m glad your legs are still working,” he said, tearing a rag off the sniper’s gillie suit, which served that purpose admirably. His hands flew into action with quick, precise movements, binding the wound. “Now hold this,” he said, twisting a stick around the knot. “Does that arm feel as bad as it looks?”
“Worse. I think the bone’s gone.”
“Just hold it for now. We’ll get you a sling once we get to the horses,” Valentine said.
“Valentine, this is loco. Loco, sir. I can’t get far like this. Maybe I can find an old basement or something, hole up for a few days.”
“No more arguing, hero. Let’s go. The posse is on its way. I’ll take your rifle.”
They walked, then jogged toward the fence line. Each step must be agony for him, Valentine thought. They made it past the skulls and to the ravine.
Two horses waited, reins tied to a fallen branch. Valentine’s Morgan had a note tucked in the saddle. Valentine uncurled it and read the soft pencil letters: “Followed orders— good luck—God bless—R.H.”
Same to you, Sarge, Valentine thought. He felt lonely and helpless. But it would not do to let Gonzalez see that.
“Harper’s moving west. Let’s go southwest. If they have to follow two sets of tracks, maybe it’ll confuse them. I’m sorry, Gonzo, but we’ve got to ride hard. I’ll help you into the saddle.”
He tightened the girths on both horses and lifted Gonzalez into his seat.
“I’ll take the reins, Gonzo, you just sit and enjoy the ride.”
“Enjoy. Sure,” he said with a hint of a smile, or perhaps an out-of-control grimace. v They rode up and out of the ravine, Gonzalez pale with pain.
Of all the strange dei ex machinae, Valentine least expected to be rescued by a livestock truck.
Valentine, after an initial mile-eating canter across the hills, slowed out of concern for his scout. Gonzalez could not last much longer at this rate. They spotted an ill-used road, in bad shape even for this far out in the country, and moved parallel, keeping it in sight.
The pair crested a hill, resting to take a good look ahead before proceeding farther. Gonzalez sat in his saddle like a limp scarecrow tied to the stirrups.
Valentine saw a little cluster of farms along a road running perpendicular to their path. Miles off to the west, a series of high bare downs marched southward. To his right, a small creek twisted and turned, moving south to where it crossed the road under a picturesque covered bridge. The bridge appeared to be in good repair, indicating the road might be in frequent use.
“Okay, Gonzo,” Valentine said, turning his horse. “Not much farther now. We’re going to walk the horses for a while in that stream. I want to pick us up an engine.”
“Are we going to give up the horses?” Gonzalez croaked.
“Yes. You can’t go on like this. By the way, do you know how to drive?”
“Maybe. I’ve worked a steering wheel a couple of times. You would have to shift, though. Can’t you drive?”
Valentine shrugged. “I used to play in old wrecked cars, but I don’t know what the pedals do.”
“Sir, let’s keep to the stream for a while. Get somewhere quiet and find an old house. Lay up for a while.”
“They might know by now what direction we went. We have to assume they want us, even if we didn’t see anything. Remember, we killed one of theirs. They won’t brush that off. According to that old Gustafsen, they’ve got some manpower concentrated there, so they have the men to do a thorough search. We need to move faster than they can get organized, which won’t be easy since they probably have radios. That means an engine. From the tracks Harper made, and ours, they’re going to be looking for us west. If we turn east, we might get ahead of whatever containment they’ll use.”
Valentine hated the idea of giving up the sturdy Morgan. His horse had proved a sublime blend of speed and stamina. But the odds against them were also increasing, making a risk the only course of action giving them a chance to escape.
Gonzalez nodded tiredly, unable to argue. His scout believed in cautiousness in any maneuvers against the Reapers, discretion being the better part of survival. Gonzalez feared everything; otherwise he would not have lived so long.
The pair rode downhill. At the stream, its rock-strewn bed barely a foot deep in most places, Valentine dismounted and took both pairs of reins, leading the horses. He hoped none of the local farm children were whiling away the afternoon fishing.
They reached the covered bridge. After scouting the shaded tunnel to make sure it was unoccupied, Valentine tied the horses to a piece of driftwood and helped Gonzalez out of his saddle. The scout sank into the cool shade, asleep or unconscious within seconds of Valentine laying him down, head pillowed by his bedroll.
Valentine scrambled up the brush-covered riverbank. He found a position near one end of the covered bridge where he could see down the road a mile in either direction. The asphalt was patched into almost a checkerboard pattern, »as if tar-footed giants had been playing hopscotch along the road. The bridge was a strange bastard construction, obviously a well-made iron-and-concrete span dating to before the coming of the Kurians but now covered with a wooden roof. The added-on planks were layered with peeling red paint, and the warped wood seemed to writhe and bend as if wishing to escape from the bridge frame.
The drone of insects and the muted trickling of the stream were soothing, and Valentine fought the urge to sleep. He counted potholes in the road, clouds, and bell-shaped white wildflowers to pass the time.
A truck appeared out of the east. It was a tractor-trailer, pulling a livestock rig. It plodded along at a gentle rate so as not to bounce its aged suspension too much over the uneven road. As it grew closer, Valentine saw that the door on the cab was either missing or removed, and the windshield on the passenger side was spider-webbed with cracks.
Valentine readied his rifle and ran to the edge of the covered bridge, keeping out of sight of the truck. He heard the truck slow as it approached the bridge, and the engine noise increased as it entered the echo chamber under the roof. Valentine sidestepped out and into the path of the creeping truck, rifle at his shoulder, and aimed at the driver.
Brakes squealed in worn-down protest, and the truck came to a stop. A head popped out of the doorless side, heavy sideburns flaring out from a ruddy face.
“Hey there, fella, don’t shoot,�
�� the man called, as if people pointing rifles at him were an everyday irritation.
“Step out of there, and I won’t. I don’t want to hurt you; I just need the truck.”
A pair of empty hands showed themselves. “Mister, you’ve got it backwards. We’ve been looking for you.”
“What ‘we’ would that be?” Valentine asked, keeping the foresight in line with the bridge of the man’s nose.
“Don’t have time to go into it, mister. I know one of you’s named David. You’re three of those Werewolf fellows from down south, right? You went to take a look at Blue Mounds. The vampires’ goons spotted you, and now there’s a big net out trying to snare you. I heard it on the radio, except the David part. That came across over the Lodge’s code through the telephone wires. I’ve been crawling up and down this road for the last hour looking for your tracks.”
“Who are you?” Valentine asked, lowering his gun slightly.
“Ray Woods is my name. Wisconsin Lodge Eighteen. That guy you talked to earlier today, Owen Gustafsen, he’s the Lodge leader here west of Madison. You might say we’re like an underground railroad. We get orphaned kids and stuff out of the state.”
Valentine wanted to believe him, badly. But Eveready had warned them time and again to look for traps. “Sorry, Ray, but I can’t trust you. If you are who you say you are, you’ll know why. We’re going to take your truck, load our horses in it, and take off. If you are who you say you are, you won’t tell anybody for a couple of hours. I could even knock you out so you have a convincing bump, if you want.”
Woods plucked at his sideburns, twiddling the curly brown hair. “Maybe you can’t trust me. But I’m going to have to ask you to take care of a friend of mine.”
The truck driver jumped out of his cab and went to a little door mounted in the side of his truck. He opened it and extracted a toolbox. He then pulled out a metal panel and extracted an eight-year-old boy from the narrow slit like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. The boy clung to the driver’s leg, watching Valentine with hollow eyes.
“This is Kurt,” Woods explained. “He’s out of Befoit. His father was taken by a Reaper a week ago, and his mother just up and disappeared. We’re trying to get him over the Mississippi to a little town called La Crescent. Maybe you can trust him.”
Valentine looked into the eyes of the little boy, and they were filled with the hurt confusion of a child whose world has vanished in an afternoon. Valentine wondered if he had looked that way to Father Max some ten-odd years ago. Woods stroked the boy’s hair.
With Gonzalez hurt, Woods was their best chance of making it out of the Kurian Zone. More like their only chance.
“Okay, Mr. Woods. I hope you know what you’re doing. Maybe you can talk your way out of getting caught bringing a child from point A to B. But we’re armed and wanted. If you get caught with us, the least they’ll do is kill you. If you have a family, you’d better think hard about them,” Valentine said, looking at the driver’s wedding ring.
“Ain’t got no family no more, mister,” Woods said. “I don’t want to be parked out here arguing all day, so what’s it going to be?”
“What do you want us to do?”
Ten minutes later, the semi was moving again. Valentine sat in a second secret compartment in the truck’s cabin. Concealing himself would be a matter of lying down and closing a steel panel. Gonzalez lay next to the little boy somewhere beneath him behind the false-backed tool locker.
“Of course, if they make a thorough search, we’re all dead,” Woods said, speaking up over the clattering engine so Valentine could hear his voice. “But I’m on the regular livestock run into Blue Mounds now. Before that, I never caused a day’s trouble—at least a day’s trouble that they knew about—in sixteen years, except when the old diesel gives me problems, of course.”
The horses rode in the trailer, hidden in plain sight next to two other crowbait nags. Valentine hoped the horses looked worn out enough to pass inspection as candidates for the slaughterhouse. Their saddles and bridles rested inside bags of feed. A few cows and pigs also rode in the trailer, adding to the camouflage and barnyard odor.
Woods listened to the Quislings’ radio calls on a tiny CB hidden inside a much larger defunct one. He explained that the only place the Quislings never searched for guns or radios was inside the dysfunctional box, its dangling wiring and missing knobs mute testimony to its uselessness. Woods simply popped the cover and turned on the tiny functioning receiver inside. “Only problem is, it’s just a scanner, so I can’t send. I’m going to get you boys in with a family in LaGrange. Alan Carlson’s part of the Lodge, and his wife’s a nurse. She’ll help your man there. Seems like most of the searchers lit off after your other guy. He dumped one of his horses in Ridgeway, and they seem to think one of you is hiding there. They’re tearing the place apart. So hopefully he gave them the slip. Better get hid, we’re coming up on some crossroads. They might have checkpoints.”
For the next half hour, Valentine rode in darkness, lulled by the gentle, noisy motions of the truck. They stopped at one checkpoint, but all Valentine could hear was the exchange of quick greetings between Woods and a pair of unknown voices.
The Carlson farm was a nice-size spread. According to Woods, Carlson was in good with the local authorities. His wife’s brother was some kind of Quisling big shot in Monroe, so he rarely had trouble finding supplies and tools tb keep the place up. He even employed another family, the Breitlings, to help him farm the land. Under cover of picking up some livestock for the voracious appetites at Blue Mounds, Woods pulled the truck into the cluster of whitewashed buildings.
“Lieutenant, you can pop the box now,” Woods said. “You’re on Alan Carlson’s place.”
Valentine climbed into the passenger seat, an improvised upholstery job mummified in duct tape with a horse blanket tied over it. The door on the passenger side was missing, as well. (“The Quislings got a real bug about wanting to see all of you at checkpoints. Sucks to be me in the winter,” Woods had explained.) The Wolf looked around. The truck had pulled around behind a little white house, between it and a well-maintained barn. The two-story frame house was screened from the road by trees and had the small, high-roofed look of a building trying to hide itself from the world. Three feet of foundation showed in the back, and the kitchen door could be reached only by ascending a series of concrete steps. The barn, on the other hand, looked like it wanted to take over the neighboring territory. It had grown smaller subbuildings like a primitive organism that reproduces itself by budding. An immobile mobile home stood beyond the barn, under the shadow of a tall silo. A garage with a horse wagon and an honest-to-goodness buggy parked side by side stood on the little gravel road that looped around the barn like a gigantic noose. Farther out, an obviously unused Quonset hut stood in an overgrown patch of brush, and a well-maintained shed completed the picture. Behind the house, cow-sprinkled fields ran to the base of a pair of tree-covered hills. Distant farms dotted the green Wisconsin hills.
The back door of the house opened, and a man in new-looking blue overalls and leather work boots stepped down the mini-staircase to the kitchen door. He fixed a nondescript red baseball cap over his sparse, sandy hair and turned to wave a boy out from the house. A young teen, in the midst of a growth spurt, judging from the look of his too-small clothes, emerged, as well. He had black skin and closely cropped hair and looked at the truck with interest. Carlson said a few quiet words to the boy, who scampered off to the road and made a great show of poking around in the ditch at the side of the road with a stick.
A golden-haired dog emerged from behind the barn and flopped down, panting in the shade with his body angled to observe the proceedings.
Woods jumped out of the truck and performed his trick with the tool locker again. At the sight of Gonzalez’s wound, Carlson hollered back to the house. “Gwennie, one of them’s hurt. I need you out here!”
“Mr. Carlson, I don’t know what you’ve heard though this netw
ork of yours, but my name’s David, and I want—,” Valentine began.
“Introductions can wait, son. Let’s get your man downstairs.”
A red-haired woman came out of the house, moving with a quick, stocky grace. She wore a simple cotton shirt, jeans, and an apron that looked like it had been designed for a carpenter. She pressed two fingers expertly against Gonzalez’s throat. Woods held the boy from Beloit in his arms. Valentine and Carlson each took an arm and helped Gonzalez. Gonzalez seemed groggy and drunk, and he mumbled something in Spanish.
They entered the house, skirting the tiny kitchen, and got Gonzalez into the basement. It was homey and wood paneled, with a little bed and some clothing that matched the kind the young teen watching the road was wearing. Mrs. Carslon put a finger into a pine knot on one of the wooden panels and pulled. The wall pivoted on a central axis near the knot. A small room with four cots, some wall pegs, and a washbasin was concealed on the other side.
“Sorry it’s so dark,” Mrs. Carlson said. “We’re not electrified on this farm. Too far from Madison. But there’s an air vent that comes down from the living room; you can hear pretty good what’s going on above, as a matter of fact. Let’s get the injured man down on the bed.”
Carlson turned back to the stairs leading up to the main floor of the house. “Molly,” he shouted, “bring a light down here!”
Mrs. Carlson extracted a short pair of scissors from her apron and began to cut away at Gonzalez’s buckskins. “What’s his name?” she asked.
“Injured man of average height,” Valentine answered.
“Okay, Injured,” she said insistently in his ear. “Can you move your fingers? Move your fingers for me. On your hurt arm.”
Gonzalez came out of his trance, summoned by her words. A finger twitched, and sweat erupted on his brow.
“Maybe a break, maybe some nerve damage. I’m not a doctor, or even a nurse, you know,” she said quietly to Valentine. “I’m a glorified midwife, but I do some work on livestock.”