by E. E. Knight
“Let’s see your work card, boy,” Flanagan said.
Valentine’s mind dropped out of gear for a second, but only a second. “Sorry, Major Flanagan. I traded it last winter. I was hungry, you know. It didn’t have my real name on it anyway.”
“Dumb thing to do, kid. You’re lucky Alan here has connections,” Flanagan said, putting down his thin cigar. He rummaged through his desk and came up with a simple form. “Fill this out for him, Alan. Just use your address. I’m giving him a temporary work card, six months. If he improves an old spread, I’ll give him a permanent one.”
“I need two, Mike. He brought a friend. There’s a lot of guys in the north woods looking for something a little more permanent.”
“Don’t press me, Alan. Jeez, these guys are worse than Mexicans; another one is always popping up outta somewhere.”
Carlson leaned forward, spreading his hands placatingly. “With two men helping me this fall, I can clear off an upper meadow I spotted. I was also thinking of building a pigpen across the road and raising some hogs, since meat is becoming such an issue. These men can help me, and I can be ready to go in the spring.”
“Fine, Alan, two work permits. Your place is going to be a bit crowded.”
“It’s only temporary. Thanks a lot, Mike. Gwen and I really appreciate it. So does Molly, of course. Stop by anytime.”
“Yeah,” Flanagan mused, “you’re a fortunate man, David. She’s a real beauty. Some of my patrollers say she’s kinda standoffish, so I wish you luck.” The major pulled out a seal punch, filled out the expiration dates, signed both cards, and punched them with a resounding click. “You’re lucky I take this with me. I don’t trust my secretary with it; she’d probably sell documents. She can forge my signature pretty good.”
“I’m in your debt, Michael,” Carlson said, handing over the work cards.
“You’ve been in my debt since I let that little Fart or whatever his name is stay with you.”
“Frat.”
“Whatever. That big place and nothing to work it but women; I pity you. I’d offer you lunch, but I’m too busy to make it, and Virgil’s hopeless. My girl is out at her parents’ place this weekend.”
“Thanks anyway, Michael, but it’s going to be a long way back. The horses are tired, so they’ll have to walk most of the way.”
“Thank you, Major Flanagan,” Valentine said, offering his hand. Flanagan ignored it.
“Thank my brother-in-law and his wife, not me. Guess they want a bunch of little half-breeds as grandchildren. Up to me, I’d take you to the Order building and let you wait for the next thirsty blacktooth, seeing as you don’t have a work card and you’re in Triumvirate lands.”
Carlson made a flick of a motion with his chin. Valentine moved past the sleeping dogs and out the door, followed by his benefactor. Flanagan tossed away his cheroot and returned to the papers strewn across his desk.
Outside, the horses were very thirsty. Ames was poking in the picnic basket.
“Virgil, please take that in, will you? We’ll water the horses ourselves. The pies are for Michael, and Gwen put in a jar of preserves for you. She remembers your sweet tooth.”
The smile-sneer appeared again. “That was kind of her. You know where the trough is. I’ll bring the basket back out to you.”
As Carlson and Valentine brought the horses over to the trough, Alan spoke softly to Valentine. “See what I mean by Major Asshole?”
Valentine clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Seems like he’s trying hard for a promotion to colonel.”
That evening, after the long ride back, the Carlsons celebrated the “legitimate” arrival of their guests. Even the Breit-lings attended, filling the dinner table past its capacity. As they made small talk, Valentine drew on his memories as a forester in the Boundary Waters to flesh out his David Saint Croix persona.
Valentine ate at Mrs. Carlson’s end of the table, across from Molly, grateful for the room the corner chair gave his left elbow. Frat sat on his right, eating with the single-minded voracity of a teenager. The Breitlings were next to Mr. Carlson at the other end of the table, with the younger Carlson girl, Mary. Gonzalez stayed in his bunk in the basement, still too weak to socialize. Mrs. Carlson explained his absence to the Breitlings as being due to illness and a fall from his horse during the journey south.
During the dinner, Carlson told stories about his summer labor, mixed with fictitious ones about how he came to know “young Saint Croix here.” Valentine played along as far as he dared but worried that the younger girl might say something about the Wolves or their horses that would blow the story. Mary kept her eleven-year-old mouth shut; her only comment during dinner was a request to ride Valentine’s Morgan someday.
“Of course, once he’s rested. Any time I’m not using him, that is. Of course I’m going to do some riding, looking for some nice land to get a farm going.”
“Maybe Molly can show you around the county,” Mr. Carlson suggested.
Molly focused her eyes on the plate in front of her. “Sure, Dad. Since you went to all this trouble to find me a husband, it’s the least I can do. Glad you’ve given me so much say in the matter. Should I get pregnant now, or after the wedding?”
“Molly,” Mrs. Carlson warned.
The Breitlings exchanged looks. Valentine figured that discord was rare in the Carlson house.
Molly stood and took up her plate. “I’m finished. May I be excused?” She went to the kitchen without waiting for an answer.
Valentine could not tell how much of the byplay was real, and how much was acting.
Two days later, he and Molly Carlson rode out on a fine, cool morning with a hint of fall in the air. Valentine’s indomitable Morgan walked next to Molly’s quarterhorse. She wore curious hybrid riding pants, leather on the inside and heavy denim elsewhere, tucked into tall rubber boots, and a sleeveless red flannel shirt. They chatted about their horses as they headed west toward the high, bare hills.
“Lucy here is great with the cows,” Molly said, patting the horse on the neck affectionately. “They’ll follow her anywhere. It’s like she can talk to them.”
“I’ve always wondered if animals talk to each other,” Valentine ventured.
“I think they can, sort of. In a real simple way. Like if you and I had to communicate by just pointing at stuff. We couldn’t write the Declaration of Independence, but we’d be able to find food and water and stuff. Warn each other about enemies. Hold it, Lucy’s got to pee.”
Molly stood up in her stirrups while the mare’s stream of urine arced into the grass behind her.
“You know horses,” Valentine observed. “Those are fine riding pants. Do you ride much?”
“No, too much to do at the farm. My sister’s the horse nut. But I did make these breeches. I like working with leather especially. I used to have some nice riding boots, but some creep in the patrols took ‘em off me. These rubber ones are hotter than hell, but they’re good for working around the cows. I sewed a leather vest for Dad, and when Mom does her calving, she’s got a big leather apron that I made.”
They trotted for a while. Watching the up-and-down motion of Molly posting left him desperate to switch the conversation back on.
“I get the feeling you don’t like us staying,” he finally said when they slowed to cut through a copse of mixed oaks and pines. The sun had warmed the morning, but Valentine was flushed from more than the heat of the day.
“Oh, maybe at first. Still don’t know what you’re doing here—”
“Just passing through. I tried to find out what was going on up at Blue Mounds,” Valentine explained.
“You probably wouldn’t tell us the truth anyway. I don’t know much about the insurgents, but I know you wouldn’t tell what you were doing so they couldn’t get it out of us, just in case. Or is it because I’m just a girl?”
“It’s not that. We have plenty of women in the Wolves. And I hear over half of the Cats are women, too.�
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“We’ve heard about you. Werewolves, always coming in the dark, just like the Reapers. Don’t you guys go into Kansas and Oklahoma and kill all the people there, so the Kurians have nothing to feed on?”
“No,” Valentine said, somewhat taken aback. “Nothing… quite the opposite. Just this spring my company brought over a hundred people out of the Lost Lands. That’s what we call places like this.”
“Lost Lands,” she said, rolling her eyes skyward. “I’ll buy that. We’re lost, all right. How would you like to spend your life knowing it’s going to end with you being eaten? I’ve developed a lot of sympathy for our cows.”
“Your uncle seems to be watching out for you all,” Valentine said, trying to reassure her.
“My uncle. I should tell you about him. No, my uncle doesn’t mean shit. A hungry vampire could still take us any night of the week, good record or no. Uncle Mike has done everything in his life exactly as the Kurians want, and he still doesn’t have one of those brass rings. And even if you get it, any Kurian can still take it away if you screw up. And if I’m all testy over the husband thing, it’s just because it makes me think about something I’d rather not think about. Let’s go up this hill. The view’s pretty nice from up top.”
They walked their horses toward the grassy slope. They crossed a field with a herd of the ubiquitous Wisconsin Hoi-steins in it, and Molly waved to a man and a boy mending a fence.
“That’s the Woolrich place. The poor woman who lives there is on her third husband. The first two got taken, one while doing the morning milking, and the second when a patrol came through just grabbing whoever they could get their hands on because a bunch of Reapers dropped in for a visit.”
They rode to the top of the hill and dismounted, loosening the girths on their wet animals. The horses began to nose in the tall, dry grass at the top of the rolling series of hills. Farmland stretched below in all directions, crisscrossed with empty roads. A hundred yards away, an old highway running along the top of the hills had degenerated into a track cleared through the insistent plant life.
“Is that why you don’t want to marry?” Valentine asked. “You’re scared of becoming a widow?”
“Scared? I’m scared of a lot of things, but not that in particular. If you want to talk about what really scares me… But no, to answer your question, I don’t want the life my mother has. She’s brought two children into the world, and is taking care of another, and for what? We’re all going to end up feeding one of those creatures. I don’t want any children, or a man. It just means more fear. It’s easy to talk about living your life, trying to get along with the system, but you try lying in bed at night when every little noise might mean something in boots and a cape is coming in your house to stick its tongue into your heart. The way I see it, the only way for us in the Madison Triumvirate to beat these vampires is to cut off their food supply. Quit pretending life is normal.”
“I see.”
“My grandmother on my mother’s side, Gramma Katie Flanagan, she was a teacher or something in Madison before everything changed. When I was about eleven, we had a long talk. She was getting old, and I think she felt her time was coming. As soon as the old people slow down, the patrols show up, sometimes with some bullshit story about a retirement home. She told me about in ancient times there were these Jewish slaves of the Romans who rose up and fought them from a fortress on top of a mountain. The Romans finally built a road or something so their army could get up to the fortress, and all the Jews killed themselves rather than be slaves again. Gramma said if everyone were to do that, it would cut off their power, or whatever they get from us.”
Valentine nodded. “I heard that story, too. It was a place called Masada. By the Dead Sea, I think. I always used to tell Father Max—he was my teacher—that I wouldn’t have killed myself if I were up there. I would have taken a Roman or two with me.”
“If it had just been another battle, would anyone have remembered it?” Molly asked.
“That’s a good question. Maybe not. I think Gandhi, you know who he is, right? I think he suggested that the Jews should have done something like that when the Nazis were exterminating them. To me, that’s just doing the enemy’s job for them. Maybe some of you should try to sell your lives a little more expensively.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You have guns, friends, other soldiers to rely on. About all we have is a broken-down old phone system and a set of code words. ”John really needs a haircut‘ for ’We have a family at our place that is trying to go north.“ Not much help when the vampires come knocking.”
Strange how her thoughts mirror mine. I was thinking the same thing the night I got here, Valentine mused.
“Maybe we can’t all commit suicide,” she continued. “But for God’s sake, we should quit helping them. We feed the patrols, work the railroads, keep the roads repaired. Then when we get old and sick, they gather us up like our cattle. They got it pretty good just because it’s human nature to ask for another fifteen minutes when you’re told you have an hour to live.”
“Brave words,” Valentine said.
“Brave? Me?” She sat down in the grass and plucked at the burrs clinging to her jeans. “I’m so scared at night I can barely breathe. I dread going to sleep. It’s the dream.”
“You have nightmares?”
“No, not nightmares. A nightmare. It’s only one, but it’s a doozy. Wait, I should tell this properly. We have to go back to Gramma Flanagan again. She told me a story about when the Triumvirate had first got things organized in Madison. I think it was in 2024, in the middle of summer. They had a group of men—well, some of them were Reapers, too—called the Committee for Public Safety. About two hundred people were working for this committee, in charge of everything from where you slept to where you went to the bathroom. The three vampires on the committee were kind of the eyes and ears of these Kurians who were dug into the State Capitol building. I don’t know how much you know about the Kurian Lords, but they sure love to live in big empty monument-type buildings. I bet a bunch of them are in Washington. But back to the story my Gramma Katie told me. There was this woman, Sheila Something-or-other, who got caught with a big supply of guns: rifles, pistols, bullets, equipment for reloading, all kinds of stuff. I think even explosives. One of the vampires said her punishment was up to the people who worked for the Committee, and if it wasn’t to their liking, they’d kill every last one of them and get a new bunch.
“So with that incentive, the whole committee goes over to where she’s being held. And they tore her to bits. With their bare hands. They took the pieces and stuck them onto sticks. Gramma said the sticks looked like pool cues, or those little flagpoles from school classrooms, stuff like that. They put her head on one, her heart on another, her liver, her breasts, even her… you know… sex parts. They made streamers out of her intestines, and painted their faces with her blood. Then they paraded back to the basketball court at the university where the Committee met and showed what they did to her to the vampires. Some of them were drunk, I guess. The Reapers looked at it all and told them to eat the bits, or they’d be killed. Gramma said there were fistfights over her liver.”
She sat silent for a moment. “Maybe I was too young to be told that story. It gave me a nightmare that night, and pretty often ever since. I’m always dreaming that I’ve done something wrong, and the crowd is coming for me. They’re all around, and they grab me and start pulling me apart. That’s when I wake up, cold and sweaty. Mary says I sometimes say ‘no, no’ in my sleep. She calls it the ‘no-no’ dream. It seems silly in the daylight, but try waking up from it at two in the morning on a windy night.”
“I have a dream, or nightmare, I guess, that keeps coming back,” Valentine began. “Never told anyone about it, not even Father Max. My mom and dad and little brother and sister got killed by a patrol when I was just a kid. I come into the house—I remember it smelled like tomatoes in the kitchen that day, but that’s not in the dream—and there�
�s my mother, lying in the living room, dead. Her legs were… Well, I guess they had raped her, or started to anyway. They shot my dad in the head. But in my dream, it’s like they’re still alive, and I can save them if I just could fix the bullet wounds. I press my hands against the blood that’s coming out of my mom’s throat, but it just keeps pulsing and pulsing out, while my little brother is crying and screaming. But I can’t save them. Can’t…” he said, voice trailing off. He looked up at the clouds to try to get the tears to go away. High white cirrus clouds painted the blue sky with icy white brushstrokes.
“I guess everyone has their own set of nightmares,” Molly said.
“Well, we’re getting plenty of help. Whatever happened to your grandmother?”
Molly Carlson wiped tears from her own eyes with the back of her hand. “Oh, she injured her back and got taken away. The vampires got her in the end, I’m sure. She got driven away by my uncle Mike. Her son. Her own fucking son.”
The following Saturday, Molly taught Valentine how to drive the four-wheeled topless buggy. The thicker reins felt funny in his left hand, the buggy whip held up in his right. Valentine was used to riding English-style with split reins, although he mostly used his legs to control the horse while riding. Driving was a completely different skill.
“You’re doing great, David, really great,” Molly said, beaming for a change. They were driving well ahead of the family cart, which held the rest of the Carlson clan as well as the Breitlings. “Of course, normally we drive the buggy tandem, which is tougher to manage, but they need the two horses for the big cart. And remember, if you ever have a load to carry in back, to place it evenly in the bed and secure it if you can. An unbalanced load will exhaust a horse faster than anything.”
The combined families of the Carlson farm were on their way to Monroe. Mr. Carlson explained that there was a speaker in town, a visitor up from Chicago to give a lecture for the New Universal Church. A Kurian organization, the New Universal Church did not demand weekly assemblies but rather encouraged people in the Kurian Order to come to the occasional meeting to catch up on new laws and policies. But now and then a true “revival” took place, and attending them was a way of keeping in the Order’s good graces.